A couple streams have gone by without me having the energy to make a blogpost. Anyway, here we are again!
ESA2 hasn’t been progressing quite as swiftly as one could hope, but the basic framework is looking very promising. I’ve added some of the first enemies as seen above, started implementing the map and in general tried to keep everything going despite lapses in progress.
News on Baba Is You follow a very similar pattern – the level editor is getting close to being feature-complete apart from a couple potentially-extremely-troublesome features. The annoying thing is that most of the level editor work isn’t very screenshot-able! I’ll have to be happy that I have ESA2 to showcase instead. I did add a new word, Nudge, and make a gif of it, though:
Also! Baba Is You won the Best Design and Innovation awards at the Game Developers Choice Awards, at which I would have been weren’t it for the looming threat of COVID-19. The talk I was going to give about Baba’s rule system was also broadcasted as a “virtual talk”, so that’s neat. Baba also received the Outstanding Game Design award at the D.I.C.E Game Awards, cool stuff! Soon there’ll be the BAFTA awards, let’s see if Baba can keep it up with people appreciating its design.
– German translation added! – The Portuguese translation had some English bits due to a mistake by me; this has now been fixed. Apologies. – The level selector turned invisible at odd points when beating a level – In certain languages the post-victory “congratulations” -text had the letters too close to each other – The displayed a mysterious error in certain cases when watching the intro cinematic – There’s now a clearer distinction between Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese in the translations. – Fixed a bug that caused the language menu to break on gamepads after changing language – Fixed a bug where watching the intro cinematic broke save data – Small errors in a couple translations were ironed out
Level adjustments: – Platformer (found in Rocket Trip; the old level was very fiddly)
After ~4 years of trying and failing, I finally took part in the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge (or 7DRL, as it’s generally known as) last week (https://7drl.com/). I still failed to finish my game in time, but compared to the only previous time I’ve actually managed to create something (in 2016), the addition of lua to my repertoire allowed quite a bit faster development and I actually got pretty far with my project. Sadly, after streaming for 8 hours on one day, I had a headache for 2 consecutive days and that kind of destroyed my chances of actually finishing. Still, I’m pretty happy with what I have now and thus decided that instead of submitting an obviously unfinished game for the challenge, I’ll try to poke at it and make it available when some of the more obvious missing features are in.
I’m especially happy about the font.
In other news! I was looking at the nice list of months in the blog sidebar, and it suddenly dawned on me that this blog is now over 10 years old! My inability to post regularly has consistently kept it from being as neat as it could be, but I’m nonetheless very happy that some kind of a catalogue of my past game-development endeavours has stayed alive this long. Thanks to Excavatorrr for giving me the push to set this up originally.
Now let’s see if we’ll get another 10 years of use out of this…!
Oh yeah, and one more (set of) thing(s): I was going to give a talk about Baba Is You at the Game Developers Conference, The MiXit conference and an event called Addon, but the first two have been canceled thanks to COVID-19, and since the third would be organized in France, I would be very surprised if it wasn’t cancelled as well. I’m currently also awaiting word on what’ll happen with Nordic Game Jam this year. Wild times.
