Monthly update: January 2025
Posted on 2025-02-09 13:27
I haven't really been able to do much gamedev with my thumb in a cast, but aside from playing all those Sokpop games I've gotten a bit of boardgame designing done. The design for this particular game, tentatively titled "9 minutes to terminus", isn't quite done, but I nevertheless entertained myself by creating assets for it in Inkscape and printing them at a local print shop. The results look pretty nice, I'd say! I suspect that the game won't be that amazing even once I'm happy with the rules, but it has served an important purpose in that it has helped me overcome my difficulties with designing boardgames for more than 2 players a bit.
Regarding the fractured thumb: I got the Kirschner wire removed & my cast off last Tuesday, and met with a physiotherapist on Thursday on how to train my thumb to get back into action. It's still very much a work in progress, but at least the fracture has healed properly. I feel like I've lost most of my gamedev momentum during the recovery process, but I'll have to try to get back to it. Hopefully I'll manage to restart my weekly streams next week.
Also in other news, a couple days ago I saw Vilma sleeping with her head resting on Fondue's butt:
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Tags: Games, Boardgames, Other, Pets, Regular updates, Art, Streaming
Sokpop Collective game recommendations!
Posted on 2025-01-24 21:01
The idea behind Sokpop Collective is that they are a team of indie developers who release small games on a set schedule, with the authors cycling to give each member time to breathe between releases. They've put out over 100 games to date, and while the games were a Patreon thing initially, they seem to (all?) be on Steam by now. I bought the Sokpop Super Bundle on Steam a bit before the end of the year after Hideko was recommended to me, and have been going through the games there since.
The quality of the releases varies a lot (in part because initially the release rate was monthly, i.e. *really* fast); there were some really solid and inspiring games in there, and now that I've gone through them all (+ a couple Sokpop entries not in the Super Bundle), I thought I'd give some recommendations (and anti-recommendations for entries that e.g. didn't work at all). Here goes!
My favourites
- Pocket Watch
Extremely charming puzzle adventure where you play through the same day multiple times, observing how different characters act and slowly piece together a plan on how to get everything you need to be done in time.
- Grunn
Mysterious gardening game with puzzle-solving & exploration. Very atmospheric and inspiring. Contains a *ton* of jumpscares, though, so be wary of that.
- Apocalich
I love maps, and this game sold me over just by the action taking place on a cool fantasy map of sorts. A fairly simple action adventure with semi-turn-based combat, but the fact that you can see things happen on the map as you do your thing elevates it a lot!
- Pear Quest
This feels in some ways like a prelude to Pocket Watch. Has the same map-based selling point for me as Apocalich. The gameplay is very simple adventuring & puzzle solving, again, but the game's very charming and fun to romp through.
- bobo robot
A very standard, small-scale metroidvania. Short but sweet.
- Springblades
Simple but enjoyable fantasy adventure with a turn-based combat system. Surprising amounts of content and some intriguing boss designs, alongside a sweet visual style. The music is also really cool and somewhat unusual for the genre, I'd say.
Games I enjoyed a lot
- Heliopedia
One of several games about combining elements to make a barren world habitable, create life and eventually bring a society into existence. I didn't get too far in this, but I love the way the game feels and looks, and it was fun to try to get different kinds of worlds into action.
- helionaut
Shares visual similarities with Heliopedia, but is a space-exploration adventure in a procedurally-generated world. Find pieces for your ship and upgrade them, collect resources and fight robots. Initially I enjoyed this greatly, but the slightly finicky controls and samey gameplay loop lessened my interest over time a bunch. Still a great time.
- WILD-9
Collect pieces for your broken ship in a space robo-westerner-esque world. I love the general vibe here, and the game reminded me of a bunch of projects I've made in the past & want to work on in the future (namely Apocalypse Adventure & Badland Quest).
- labyrinth
Small platforming adventure in mysterious ruins. A nice display of Sokpop's Game Maker -based 3D engine, although the layering issues present caused a bunch of readability issues here. Gives me ICO vibes.
- Goblet Cave
Delve deep into a cave and rescue spelunkers and rubies, eventually reaching the golden goblet at the bottom. Very janky, but hit my interests spot-on; I love planning my route and navigating & mapping out a cave system. I guess it's telling that Excavatorrr and CWOUN do a very similar thing, haha.
- Hideko
Another combine-elements-to-create-life kind of thing, this time in a more puzzly presentation. Charming and fun to play with, although the game seemed to want me to create marble mazes for my own fun which I didn't really care for.
- Frog's Adventure
Cute and fun point-and-click-esque adventure with light puzzling. Features one of the more unexpected plot resolutions I've seen in a game like this!
- Luckitown
Roll dice to get resources, use resources to build structures that either improve your defense, deal damage to attackers or provide other resources. The gameplay is a whole bunch of fun, but the difficulty gets *very* high by the time you get to the end of the second season (out of 4).
Games I enjoyed
- Klym
Climb around a town to return all baby ducks to their mother. The controls are a bit janky and I had some issues with the scrolling, but otherwise had a good time. Short & sweet.
- Grey Scout
Rescue prisoners from cages and return them safely to your boat. The sneaking mechanic is quite forgiving, which makes the game much more approachable. Quite short but I enjoyed it a bunch.
- Moeras
Hunt a large beast on a battlefield armed with just your trusty bow. Very bare-bones but intriguing.
- Berry People
Not part of the Super Bundle. A short, cute Pokémon Snap -esque exploration game. I wish the game did a *bit* more with the concept, since as it is the experience is very simplistic and all your photos will be of similar-looking berry people, but I had a cozy time with it all the same.
- Soko Loco Deluxe
(I played Deluxe, but only the original soko loco is in the Super Bundle.) Build train tracks to create supply lines to fulfill the goal in each level. I appreciate that the game doesn't push you too hard to do this super efficiently or quickly (at least in the parts I played), but this also opens the door to some rather tedious optimizing since you can tear up tracks you've laid without losing anything. Still a fun time, though!
- Stacklands
Also not part of the Super Bundle. Buy boosters, place cards representing animals and resources onto each other to get other resources, learn new recipes. I enjoyed the game and it was fairly addictive, but the manual mousework needed became a lot and the booster-based card-unlocking method got a bit tedious over time. Still solid.
- Aran's Bike Trip
A mildly interactive travelogue of a two-day bike trip. Features a nice map view of the route taken and beautiful photos of things seen on the way. I love the scenery and I love biking, so I enjoyed following along a lot.
Honourable mentions
- Sunset Kingdom: Fun little kingdom-building strategy game. Takes a lot of time to get going, though.
- Ballspell: A solid implementation of the concept popularized by Montezuma('s Revenge?) Not too exciting but a solid game nonetheless.
- Ginseng Hero: Nice little action adventure in a bug world.
- The Hour of the Rat: Infiltrate a castle & assassinate the emperor. Neat idea marred by fairly janky movement.
- Tile Tale: Push tiles on a grid to rectangle patterns to earn more tiles and unlock new ones. Enjoyable but a bit mindless?
- Pilfer: Steal goods in a town as a sneaky thief. I didn't get too far but enjoyed what I saw.
- Blue Drifter: Assassinate people in a sci-fi setting. There's very little game here, but I enjoyed the presentation a lot.
- Uniseas: Real-time strategy where you command pirates trading and pillaging. Very cool but also very overwhelming, with there being 3 opponents doing their stuff all the time.
Games that didn't work or seemed otherwise off
- Tomscape: Didn't seem to work at all for me.
- Zoo Packs: Didn't seem to work at all for me.
- Rock Paper Sock: Didn't seem to work at all for me.
- King of the Sandcastle: Seemingly a multiplayer-only game with no players left.
- Botanik: Seemingly a gardening game where all players exist on the same map, kind of. No players left, so all I saw was a sea of greenhouses with dead plants.
- huts: You walk in a small 3D forest but can't seemingly do anything.
- visser: You can catch a fish, but other than the cute presentation there didn't seem to be a goal or much to do here.
- Frog Struggles: It seems that there's more to this game, but after playing for a bit I couldn't understand how to progress beyond awkwardly flying around or why I could sometimes pick up cherries and sometimes not.
- Di-Da-Dobble: Yahtzee but without a goal and with n-of-a-kind being the only recognized hand. Being able to slam the table to alter the result was cute, though.
- Wamu Wamu 2: The game seemed to softlock both times I tried to play.
- vissekom: Watch a fish in a fishbowl. Every couple minutes a 3D prop drops into the bowl. From what I could see, there was no further interactivity other than clicking on stuff to make them bounce inside the bowl, but the achievements seem to imply I missed something.
- Pupper Park: You're a dog and spend ~15 minutes in a dog park with other dogs. There are a couple minigames to play but overall it didn't feel like there was much to do.
Overall, I had a lot of fun going through these! It was nice to have a collection of games where I don't have a particular internal pressure to really dedicate a lot of time to each one, so I could do a little taste test and then play the ones I especially enjoyed further.
It feels like the very barebones/unfinished releases make more sense in a Patreon-based release model because the idea is that people support an artist instead of paying for a given product; putting all these games on Steam changed the equation in my mind a bit, which is a bummer when it comes to the weaker releases. Oh well; apart from a couple exceptions I did find it intriguing to check out even the less refined stuff. Thank you for making all these neat games, Sokpop Collective!
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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 updates, 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 Tags: Games, Small games, Boardgames, Covemountlikes, Browser games, Regular updates, Other Gridmount, website update & more Tags: Games, Browser games, Covemountlikes, Regular updates, Other, Art, Pets Environmental Station Alpha C++ version is out! Monthly update: September 2024 Tags: Other, Streaming, Regular updates, Games, Boardgames, Social media, Plans, Planet Keke, ESA 2 Pages
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.
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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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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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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