Anyway, big news first: Mobile Suit Baba is out! Really glad it didn’t take a year, but it got close. I want to add a bit more in terms of modding support and such, but after that it’ll be time to return to Planet Keke.
I also finished Flatdog Scuffle, another 2-player abstract boardgame! The rulebook will need some clarifications and illustrations, but the game seems to work pretty nicely.
To be honest, not too much has happened over the past three months. Mobile Suit Baba trudges ever onwards, Planet Keke has been on hold to give more time for the former, blah blah. The most significant change over here has been Vilma’s introducton to the ecosystem. This has gone mostly fine, I’d say.
I ran playtests of two more-than-2-player boardgames; one is a more eurogamey deal, while the other is a roll-and-write. Unsurprisingly the eurogame design didn’t work very well on the first playtest, while the RnW showed more promise. I’ve been excited abour Ledergames‘ Root again, and pondered about something inspired by it and My City.
I removed Elder Dance from Itch.io since it turned out that the design had some very glaring issues. I have an idea for how to address them now, but said ideas need more testing.
ESA 2 has also progressed at a ponderous but nonetheless existent pace. I’ll need to refactor the moving platform code sometime soon, and this prospect isn’t one I look forward to.
I decided to finally record a playthrough of the old 2006 demo of Spud’s Quest by Chris Davis. It’s a klik-based game that’s close to my heart and virtually impossible to find online anymore, and as such showcasing it to a larger crowd seemed like a fun idea. I’ll do a playthrough of the full game as well at some point.
I made one more cover & comic for our student organization’s magazine! Technically there’s still one more issue coming out before the end of the year, but I doubt I’ll be participating in it due to the whole “I’ve graduated now” thing.
Her name is Vilma, and I adopted her because her previous owner had to spend a lot of time away from home and we thought it’d be better for her to be somewhere with a person around. She’s a very chill cat, which is great because I mostly have experience with dogs.
A couple days ago she wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and I assumed I had either missed her being under the bed, or that she was in some new place to hang out in. Later on I saw her emerge from my wardrobe in the bedroom, and realized that she had made herself a nest among my pants! Very wholesome.
She sometimes lets me scratch her belly and climbs on top of my work chair on occasion, both of which are very fun details. I think we’ll be friends.
Would you look at that, it’s another abstract 2-player boardgame! This one has been cooking for a while, and I’m still not 100% sure if the design works, but the playtests I did have (thanks quantumpotato) were promising.
I really need to do these at the end of the month instead of during the next month, I have a lot of stuff from September I’d want to write about!!
Anyway – last month was mostly fairly uneventful. My game projects progressed, the solitaire collection got another new solitaire (not released yet), Planet Keke got its name and moved along at a slow-but-steady pace, same for Mobile Suit Baba & ESA2.
I’ve had a bunch of trouble lately concentrating on my game projects when not streaming. With this in mind the weekly streams have been excellent, but it has meant that I’ve only done work on my projects a couple hours every week, and that doesn’t quite cut it due to how slow everything progresses at the moment. I’ll need to figure out something there…
My favourite procrastination from videogame dev has become… boardgame dev! I designed about 3-ish new boardgames last month, one of which can be seen above. The design processes might spill a bit over to September, hard to remember. Anyway, I have 3 boardgames that I think are almost ready, but that need a final(?) looking-at, as well as writing out the final rules, before I’m happy putting them available. I removed Malsymmetric from my Itch.io listing because after some thought that one didn’t really feel solid enough. Maybe I should take another look at it…
What else… right, I set up the Mailchimp newsletter thing, and sent the first newsletter at the end of last month! That was exciting! I doubt I’ll have enough content for regular monthly messages, but maybe that’s a positive for most of the people receiving them; makes sense to only send out stuff when there’s something to actually say.
And finally: I graduated! For real this time! I’m now a Master of Psychology, and I also applied for and received official sanctioning so now I’m also a real, proper Psychologist. Nice! I’m planning to join some student events this autumn to get a final taste of university life as a way of saying farewell to that part of my life. I’ll also be drawing a final(?) comic & cover art piece to our student magazine.
I guess that’s it, mostly? As said, it’s hard to remember anymore exactly what took place in August and what’s already September material. Not that any of this really matters, haha.
I decided on a mostly-whim to export this tiny 2008 escape room game to HTML5, since it seemed fairly trivial and since despite the game’s simplicity I have some fondness for it. Anyway, I did end up having to do some additional work to get the thing rendering at double resolution, but whatever. The game’s likely to take less than 10 minutes to finish.
In other news, all but one of the Limited Alike puzzles in my WPC post below were outdated, broken versions; I’ve now updated them all, as well as added a Celltinels puzzle I had missed into the post.
I decided to finally set up a mailchimp account in order to be able to let interested people subscribe for some kind of news about my games. This seemed prudent since I bet there’s a bunch of people who didn’t want to move from Twitter to Cohost/Mastodon and thus haven’t been seeing any news stuff related to my projects. You can find the subscription page here.
