More LITOS & Happy new year!
I made three more LITOS puzzles!
Archive for December 2022
I made three more LITOS puzzles!
Ok! I’ve been promising a general “what’s going on” post for a while now, and I guess it’s time to write exactly that. When this year started, I had a couple specific plans for how I’d handle my game development throughout the year (and in some cases onwards from there):
So how did all this turn out? Not very well. The structured schedule and the monthly game system both fell apart already in January. I couldn’t get myself to stay awake long enough if I woke up early, and preferred going to sleep when I felt tired, sleeping through the day and then being awake overnight. The first monthly game I had planned, a refined version of my earlier Ludum Dare #47 entry Keke’s Underwater Adventure, turned out to be way too large in scope (and most of the other ideas I had picked for monthly projects had the same issue, I suspect) and while I did get some stuff implemented, by the end of the month things were way too unfinished to call the result a success.
So yeah, not great. I don’t remember the exact order of events at this point, but I think I decided pretty quickly to try to make 12 small games over the year in total instead of trying to make one game every month. As for the weekly schedule, it seemed that since the issue was mostly feeling tired (and a decade of getting used to being a night owl), I was better off trying to live with it for the time being, especially because on top of tiredness I was noticing a slightly concerning lack of energy to make things. I did eat more than a half of a Carolina Reaper chili, though!
I had a plan for an April’s Fools game (two, in fact!) but the aforementioned lack of energy posed a fairly serious obstacle because I couldn’t muster the will to make either game happen on time. Luckily later in April I participated in Nordic Game Jam, which allowed me to actually finish a project, RUDE CHESS. I guess this triggered further productivity, because over the weeks following RUDE CHESS I managed to also finish It’s A Me, Baba Is You XTREME (one of the two April’s Fools games), Baba Friend and Keke in the Caves of Peril. Yay!
Before NGJ I started having constant restless leg syndrome, which further caused trouble with sleeping and keeping my daily rhythm straight. I often had to tire myself to get any sleep at all, and after the above burst of productivity, over the Summer I fell into a serious lull in motivation, resulting in me stopping bi-weekly gamedev streams and not really feeling like working on games at all for ~3 months. Ugh!!! I did manage to do some paper puzzle design and comics drawing in the meantime, but something was seriously not right.
October drawing close, I was contacted about a plan to make a small bundle of Halloween-themed games. This seemed like a potentially good way to get back on track gamedev-wise and I agreed, deciding on a whim on my game idea (or maybe it was more than a whim, I can’t remember. I think I had come up with the idea slightly before and decided to use it because it seemed funny?) Around this time I also had some blood tests taken and it turned out that I had a serious iron deficiency both in terms of hemoglobin and body iron reserves. And would you believe it, this turned out to have been the issue all along: getting some extra iron gave me motivation & energy back, and the restless leg syndrome went away, too! What’s funnier, a friend had recommended having my iron levels checked just before this (advice which I didn’t heed). Lesson of this story is: don’t get iron deficiency.
With the iron issue sorted out, I managed to finish The Plumber Thing, and this then led into a bunch of unrelated small games: Mamono Mower, Cavern Sweeper, Babataire, Babataire EX, a rerelease of Cavern of Flight, a rerelease & update of Once in Space, a holiday update to The Plumber Thing, some paper puzzles and finally It’s A Block-Pushing Game, fulfilling the goal of the year (or not, depending if the rereleases count). Overall I’m really happy with this year’s productivity, which is a bit surprising considering the iron deficiency. I also recorded a playthrough of a game I liked as a child, Lost Valley.
There are a couple things that were left somewhat or entirely unfulfilled over the year:
And now, what’s planned for the next year?
Here’s a list of the games released this year, alongside the source of inspiration for them (if I can remember it):
Maybe that’s enough of that?
One more game for this year! I know I didn’t make blogposts of every thing I made this year, but I’ll try to do a “year-in-review” post in the coming days. Anyway!! This is an idea that has bounced in my head for a bit, and I ended up using the engine base I had made for RUDE CHESS earlier this year, with slight adjustments. The result is bare-bones but I don’t think it really needs to be more than that to convey the concept.
(I’m being vague about the contents to make the surprise land better (hopefully). If you get a Windows Defender false positive, that’s NOT the surprise!!)
Ok! The year is nearing its end, but I guess there’s time for at least one more paper puzzle. My previous tests, Mark the spot included, have skewed towards fairly complex rules, so here I tried to do something much simpler.
Ok! I’ve been working on a “holiday update” of sorts for The Plumber Thing, mainly because I felt that the game could’ve done with a little bit more content & polish. That’s done now, released just yesterday together with a 50% discount on Itch.
The update mainly adds a new area, a new powerup, new puzzles and some extra details and polish. If you liked the original game, this is probably up your alley.
Ooh, a new paper puzzle type? This one is quite messy, but I had toyed with a cross-drawing type for some time and felt that this was the most promising idea so far.
I hope the rules are understandable! I feel that this type is easier to understand intuitively than it is to write out? Maybe??