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2024 in review
Posted on 2024-12-31 01:44

Here we are again, at the end of the year. I'm looking at the 2023-in-review post as I'm writing this, and right from the get-go I can notice a clear difference in one aspect: 2024 was my most productive year ever, if we calculate that purely by the number of videogames released. Saying this feels somewhat disingenuous due to the fact that most of the Covemountlikes that make up the high release rate were extremely tiny, spur-of-the-moment things, with multiple taking less than a full day to get done. On the other hand, several of the games that account for the previous record unusually-active year, 2009, were also made in just a couple weeks, so in that sense it wouldn't be fair to consider this year "cheating" in some way. I guess with a metric like this the biggest problem is that larger releases that take their time will get unfairly little attention since they fill just a single increment on the bar chart, just like everything else. Oh well.

Alongside the onslaught of Covemountlikes this year saw a couple other releases. Out of those the most notable videogame release was A Solitaire Mystery, although I still intend to get back to it to add some more solitaires and to polish things up further so I'm not quite done with the project. At this point it might make sense to note that ASM was chosen to be showcased at the Experimental Games Showcase at GDC 2025! I won't be participating in person due to the travelling required etc, but it's cool to be accepted in any case. :)

Other than videogames, I made a couple boardgames and paper puzzles. The latter was very much sidelined for this year, although I did occasionally spend time trying to come up with new genres, to no avail. In the boardgame department, Royal Jelly actually garnered some additional interest, as evidenced by 2 people making their own sets (first, second)! This is also the first year I ever entered a boardgame design contest, although my game, Stroll & Hike, didn't fare too well. In fact I made another boardgame for a different contest near the start of the year, but a period of anxiety caused me to miss the deadline and I haven't polished the game up for release yet.

In terms of things not related to releasing creative works, a big change for me this year was that I joined a small group of streamers and we've organized a whole bunch of collaborative streams throughout the year. Thanks to everyone in the possibly-unnamed crew for their kindness!

Another big change was the introduction of Fondue the cat to my life. Apart from me having problems with treating her asthma with an inhaler, I'd like to say that her time here has been positive and she's gained a lot of courage and received a lot of care. Although 2 weeks ago she did swallow a salted peanut and ended up needing surgery for it, the poor cat. She has recovered very well and next Thursday she'll get the wound-licking-prevention jumpsuit off, which I'm sure she'll be very happy about. Vilma has also been doing mostly great, except that her knowledge of being able to demand attention has given me some frustration over the year, haha.

Fondue's not the only one who required medical attention near the end of the year - a couple days ago I fell over after stumbling on some cobblestones and fractured my right thumb. After the cast was put in place the finger hasn't hurt that much, and surprisingly enough I was able to put the final covemountlike together in spite of it. Still, that's 6 weeks of recovery ahead of me, and I actually have to go back to the hospital for additional X-rays because apparently the finger might not be entirely right still. Moral of the story: falling over can be nasty!

A thing that is big for me but probably not anyone else is that I moved my website into a completely new era of design, creating a more dynamic listing for my games, moving my blog away from Wordpress and bringing my art from DeviantArt to my own webspace. It was nice to set this stuff up, and I hope some people other than just me find utility in the website. (Although Hostmonster just announced merging with Bluehost and advertising their AI tools, so we'll see if I'll suddenly need to migrate the whole thing elsewhere, urgh...)

Might that be about it? Next year I think I'll try to concentrate more on slightly larger projects now that this year was themed heavily after making a ton of extremely tiny things. It'd be nice to finally manage to paint again, too, but we'll see about that. ESA2 and Planet Keke will stay on the docket, at least. Happy new year!

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Tags: Games, ESA 2, Planet Keke, Covemountlikes, Small games, Browser games, Other, Regular games, Pets, Article, Boardgames

More Mounts
Posted on 2024-12-22 14:50

2 more Covemountlikes! I'm trying to push these out a bit faster again, to get a couple final ideas out of my head before the end of the year. At this point it feels like it'd be a good idea to call Covemountlikes the "big" thing of 2024 and try to move on next year, barring the hypothetical collection where I bring them together into a singular whole. We'll see.

Play Starmount
Play Covermount

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Tags: Games, Covemountlikes, Browser games, Small games

A game and a boardgame!
Posted on 2024-12-15 11:08

The year is nearing its end, but there's still time for some updates and games. Behold:

Yup, that's a new covemountlike. The count is now at 29, and I think I'll take some time at the end of the year to concentrate on getting to 30 (or 32, depending on how well things go).

Play Covemouth

I also released another boardgame! This time it's a roll-and-write, which is a first for me. I started making this for fun, if I remember correctly, but quantumpotato from Playlines Games encouraged me to submit it to a design contest over at BoardGameGeek. The game didn't do very well and only placed in one category (7th in the "Multiplayer game" category, although I did receive an award myself for giving feedback); I overcomplicated the rules in the name of thematic considerations and didn't add quite enough variety between sessions to force players to alter their approaches. In any case, I'm quite proud of the game, and it was an excellent learning experience (also in terms of learning how to make vector art with Inkscape!) If you enjoy roll-and-writes, it might make for a fun game or two.

Download Stroll & Hike

The cats are also here.

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Tags: Games, Small games, Covemountlikes, Boardgames, Browser games, Pets, Happenings

Portal Field & Doooors update
Posted on 2024-11-17 19:48

I've had Portal Field pretty much finished for months now, but I've been thinking that I'd like to refine it just a *smidge* before putting it out there; ultimately I ended up not worrying about that after all and just released it, warts and all. The rulebook has gotten some good criticism already so I'll be refining it post-release sometime soon, but it's nice to have the game available in any case.

Download the rules on Itch.io!

I also realized that I could refine Doooors, the puzzle game I released in 2010, fairly easily and did just that! The game has suffered from extremely annoyingly floaty physics and various other nuisances that I for whatever reason never bothered to fix and that take away from the puzzle-solving experience; with this refining I tried to finetune the physics and do some mostly-minor adjustments to make the gameplay feel better. I also added the game remembering your progress. Hopefully Doooors is now a better game to experience, awful title aside.

Check out the new version!

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Tags: Games, Boardgames, Small games, Old games, Ludum Dare

Monthly update: November
Posted on 2024-11-16 23:41

The year is nearing its end, but there's still time for some more Covemountlikes! Enter Cellmount, a very clunky puzzle concept test that might be too annoying to play to be really enjoyed but that in my opinion nevertheless showcases some interesting design space. The count is now at 28, so only 2 of these to go!

Check it out on itch.io!

I've also added & adjusted a couple things on the game page: new additions are Mekaaninen Mies, one of my first finished games from 2002, and Pilari, a No More Sweden entry from 2014 that I'm somewhat fond of despite its shortcomings. I also edited the Boardgames section to have a separate link for each game, instead of linking to the collection on Itch.io. I have one 2-player abstract pretty much ready for release so maybe I'll get to do that too before the year ends.

Tags: Games, Small games, Boardgames, Covemountlikes, Browser games, Regular updates, Other

Gridmount, website update & more
Posted on 2024-11-05 00:11

Another covemountlike! The pace has really slowed down, but if we count in RUDE CHESS and IT'S A BLOCK-PUSHING GAME the count is at 27, and as such I'd be really happy to reach 30 before the end of the year.

Play the game on Itch.io

In other news, I updated the games list on my website to use the same basic system I coded for the art gallery & this blog. The new games can fit much more games and includes a tag system for easier findability, so I've added some games that were previously missing in there and will probably add some more.

I've been foraging more mushrooms and decided to try out a traditional drying method of hanging the mushrooms on a string. It seemed to work very well, and the dried mushrooms make for a neat decoration, too! I must do more of this next year. I've also photographed some other mushrooms I saw:

Also take a look at the cats:

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Tags: Games, Browser games, Covemountlikes, Regular updates, Other, Art, Pets

Environmental Station Alpha C++ version is out!
Posted on 2024-10-23 09:41

We've been working on a new version of ESA with MP2 Games in order to fix some issues with the game and such, and said version is now done. There're a bunch more issues to fix there, as there always are, but it's really nice to see some long-standing problems addressed. Included in the update are things such as:

- Steam Deck support
- Linux/Mac support (the old Mac version had been broken for a while)
- Proper gamepad support, including on other platforms
- Some bugfixes
- Steam achievements
- Steam Overlay (I had to disable it for the entire game back in the day due to rendering issues)
- 60 FPS (the game used to run at... 55 FPS. For silly reasons)

As said, there are still some problems that need addressing, and I'll need to gather energy to get to that, but this is nevertheless a really big step forward for ESA. Yay!

ESA on Steam

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Tags: Games, ESA

Monthly update: September 2024
Posted on 2024-09-30 23:58

As mentioned earlier, I didn't make a monthly update in August due to there not being much to report outside of steady progress on my existing projects. The same has mostly continued this month. The art gallery and reaction faces are the big unusual things, but I already posted about those; same goes for the new covemountlike. Darn!

I've been visiting our summer cottage a bunch and foraging mushrooms while there, mainly with my mom; it's been a really good foraging year. Consequently I've been also pondering about various mushroom-themed games, mainly in the boardgame department. I think I have one pretty neat idea related to this, but we'll see if it ever becomes anything. Mushroom-themed boardgames seem to tend to concentrate more on the "picking" part, and I'd want to involve the "identifying" part more in a hypothetical dream foraging game.

Speaking of boardgames, I realized just now that I did forget to post about a new release here! I put a new abstract boardgame on Itch, called Royal Jelly. I posted a picture of it earlier, but it required a bunch of polish and playtesting before I felt happy with it and so the release happened only now. I'm pretty happy overall with the result, though!

Check Royal Jelly out on Itch!

I also submitted another boardgame project of mine, Stroll & Hike, to a design contest on BoardGameGeek due to encouragement from quantumpotato, who has playtested and given feedback on a lot of my boardgame projects over the years. I designed most of Stroll & Hike earlier this year, but it being a contest entry has meant that I've now polished it up a whole bunch. I'll make a formal-er post about the game when the contest is over and/or I feel that the game is ready for release.

As for the longer-term projects, ESA2 and Planet Keke have progressed ever onwards, although I did take a break of several weeks from them due to various factors. Planet Keke has been gaining form in a really nice way, I'm much happier with the engine now than I was some time ago.

As a funny side thing, I sent boxes of Finnish candy to 4 people from the Crew (i.e. streamers I've been doing some game streams with this year) and we did a stream of them trying them out. Sadly none of the others liked salmiak (salted licorice), but Saane ended up enjoying the tar-flavoured candy!

This ended up being actually a whole lot more substantial than I initially expected! That's nice, I was assuming that I'd have kinda low-content updates for several months here.

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Tags: Other, Streaming, Regular updates, Games, Boardgames, Social media, Plans, Planet Keke, ESA 2

New stuff in the gallery
Posted on 2024-09-10 03:10

I added a bunch of new art to the gallery. Or well, 'new' - the new additions are largely really old stuff from before I went to university, and mostly there to showcase the development of my art throughout the years.

Relatedly, some of the old art was so crummy in my eyes now that I added a special category for it - there's now the 'Archive' category, and pieces in it won't be shown in the normal gallery view unless you're viewing a specific timeframe, tag, or such. This way I can keep the default gallery listing a bit more curated while still including art that hasn't aged too well but was important to me in some way.

Gallery here

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Tags: Other, Art

Circlemount
Posted on 2024-09-09 18:43

A new covemountlike! It was nice to make a really tiny thing again after months of working on Planet Keke & ESA2. Hopefully there'll be more sooner rather than later.

Check it out on Itch.io!

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