Posts from year 2019:
Baba Is You patch notes (December 17th) – version 1.0.5 Tags: Games, Baba Is You Progress post #128: Official level editor shenanigans Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates, Plans Progress post #127: Objects, objects, objects Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Small games, Regular updates, Streaming Progress post #126: Turn Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Progress post #125: Languages (aaggaaiinn) Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Progress post #124: Languages (again) Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Progress post #123: Miscellaneous Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Progress post #122: Languages Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates, Other, Plans Paintings! Tags: Art Stumblehill is here! Tags: Games, Small games, Other
Posted on 2019-12-17 00:55
Oh no, has it seriously been 7 months without Switch updates? That’s terrifying, and I apologize for things taking this long. Oh well – we’re now here so might as well list what has happened over that time:
- Fixed a small ending-related visual bug if the grid is enabled
- Fixed a rather severe oversight where certain rules were adding events to the undo buffer in the wrong order, causing errors
- Added an additional check for situations where the player would’ve cleared an area but due to e.g. level repositioning between versions didn’t get the flower for it
- Fixed a bug where floating Baba and a weak Wall would have a mystery interaction
- In certain cases where the game would freeze, it displays a special effect instead (this’ll be expanded on and it might not appear in the game at the moment)
- Large underlying code reworking related to conditionals, not relevant in the game right now but it’s work for the future
- Related to the above, conditionals with parameters behave in an equivalent way whether the condition has a Not or not
- Fixed the word Facing not accepting directional words
- Related to above, made Empty Is work mostly as intended
- Fixed “Empty Is X” particle effects appearing everywhere even if Empty had a conditional word
- Added guest credits to “Across”. Apologies to Corey Martin for missing that when adding the level.
- New option in the settings menu! You can now disable screenshake.
- There’s a new secret thing in the game!
- A certain map now has a clear counter like other maps, so you can actually fully finish it. This should retroactively activate if you’ve already cleared the map.
- Changed the way the level selector works. This shouldn’t affect the playing experience apart from one level adjustment listed below. If you note new bugs with the level selector, I’m very interested in knowing about them.
- If you’d try to enter two levels at once, the game now opens a menu to pick from.
- Added a visual indicator for movement that “fails” (i.e. ends up not moving the object). So if Baba moves against a Shifting object, you’ll now get a small visual indicator that some movement happened.
- Fixed a buggy cutscene.
- You can now use “Return to map” in a new spot.
- Fixed a slightly annoying error with how the map cursor is positioned in certain rare situations
- Fixed a level selection -related bug
- Fixed a particular Win-condition not working
- Fixed a rare conditional statement not working
- Fixed a case of the player not being able to enter a level despite having the map cursor on them
- Fixed a case of the game trying to enter an erroneous level in certain circumstances
- Fixed a case of the game ignoring a level if it thought you were trying to enter two levels at once
- Fixed the game storing sub-second frame timing data improperly; not very important but I guess the game tracks your playtime more accurately now
- Fixed a graphical glitch in an ending-related thing
- Fixed a case where the borders of the levels were considered Empty
- Fixed a rare bug relating to an endgame conditional word
- Languages! The game now supports 13 languages, with more coming later. Note that the translations only affect the UI and menus; the graphics are English-only. We tried hard to look into localizing it all but it would’ve been too massive of an undertaking. (Please report any issues with the translations, be it on Steam or in-game!)
- You can now see the version ID in the bottom-left corner of the main menu! Relatedly, I moved away from the two-letter version naming scheme because it could’ve been confusing.
- The game will get an official level editor in 2020! I’ll make a flashier announcement about that in a bit. Anyway, there have been some underlying changes in preparation for that.
Levels adjusted/changed
- Whoops
- Collaborative effort
- Acrobatics
- Tectonic Movements
- Seeking Acceptance
- Heavy Cloud (this might actually be a large change)
- Keke And The Star
- The Heist
- Gallery
- Backstage
- Maritime Adventures
- Elusive condition
- Floodgates (used to have tons of rules, adjusted the level to have the same idea with less fixed rules)
- A Way Out?
- Another Way
- ???
- Meteor Strike
- Triplets (a large unintended solution)
- Rocky Road (changed Foliage to Rocks to keep the name sensible)
- Hidden Path
- Out At Sea (added water that I had removed during development for the name to make some sense)
- Tunnel (the level didn’t utilize the intended mechanic)
Posted on 2019-11-18 05:10
People who have followed my increasingly-infrequent streams already knew this, I guess, but it’s now official – Baba Is You will get this cool, official (and hopefully polished-ish) level editor next year! What’s even neater is that it’ll support sharing your levels with other players over the internet!! Exact details of what that means will come later, though.
Relatedly, I streamed both yesterday and today after a long(?) break, adding stuff to the editor. Today’s big thing was the ability to remove objects from your “object palette”; it feels like removing entries from a list/database is always somewhat more precarious than adding them (although, now that I think of it, in this specific case the adding was also quite precarious because it had to be implemented on top of Baba’s existing editor structures without breaking them.) Anyway, the deletion system seemed to work very neatly almost from the get-go, so that’s excellent.
Future streams (which’ll probably be still quite erratic; I moved recently and the rest of the year (and the beginning of next year) is looking way too busy) will probably be largely about these same topics; it’d be cool to get the editor out next spring, but I’m not holding my breath (I think.)
Posted on 2019-10-03 03:30
The past couple streams have concentrated on Baba’s level editor’s object selector. Making a robust system that doesn’t break down but allows stuff like searching & tags has been relatively fun but also a *lot* of work. It’s kind of funny to think that once this bit of the editor works, it might turn out to be the single largest hurdle to overcome. Possibly not, but I like the idea.
On top of Baba, some work was recently done on fixing the (final?) outstanding issues in Stumblehill. It’d be neat to add a bit more content to that game, but it’s probably for the best if I don’t add another tentative thing onto the already-overflowing to-do -list.
Posted on 2019-08-25 04:38
Streamed some Baba development and a *little* bit of ESA2. Baba work included a small step forward with the official editor, implementing the Turn-word seen above, investigating a mystery cornercase bug and redesigning a level I didn’t like (not sure if it’s better now, though.) I intended to do more ESA2 stuff, but work there ended up being mostly small editor features and replaying the old version a bunch.
Posted on 2019-08-18 02:22
Got a small stream done tonight! There’s still a little bit of translation work to be done, but things are looking pretty nice on that front. It sure has taken some time, though, thanks to my bumbling. Today I fixed various tiny issues with certain translation-related code and tried to redesign a level I dislike, unsuccessfully. Oh well!!
Posted on 2019-08-07 01:21
Today’s stream saw me finally draw the cyrillic alphabet for Baba Is You! The game won’t be fully localized but we’re doing translations of the UI for a bunch of languages and it’s neat to get forward with that. I’m quite happy with how the symbols look in the game’s doodly font.
I also had time to work a bit on ESA 2; I fixed some bugs and started adding some needed features for the game’s level editor. It’d be neat to finally get to the point where I can start building some rooms, though!
Posted on 2019-08-03 02:23
More streaming! Today’s streaming was mostly just fixing a couple bugs in Baba, then implementing some final bits of translation code and starting some complicated level editor code. Slow-going but pretty neat.
I also demonstrated ESA 2’s original version on-stream and started feeling really bad about restarting the project; there were lots of neat things in the original! Bummer about all the clunky stuff, hmph.
Posted on 2019-07-30 02:58
Finally got to stream a bit again. I’ve been getting tired quite early lately, which is good for purposes of going to sleep at a reasonable time, but less ideal for purposes of getting streaming done.
In any case, streaming happened today! It was a short one, less than 2 hours, but I got some really neat stuff relating to Baba’s translation done. Certain languages will need using a special font instead of the game’s in-built, hand-drawn one, and this stream was spent on implementing the rendering of said special font. Tedious and at times frustrating stuff, but everything went really smoothly here in the end which was a really welcome surprise!
Really looking forward to getting this part of the development handled. This Autumn is looking to become extremely, extremely busy, because I’ll have to finish some very important university-related work. We’ll see how that goes; it might be that I’ll have to postpone some Baba-related work in order to get certain courses done with dignity (or even just done, haha.)
Posted on 2019-07-09 01:11
Yay! Paintings after a long break! I’m trying to get back to this hobby – it’s really hard to start painting but once I do get started, it’s fun (if a bit scary, generally you can’t really fix watercolour paintings later.)
Posted on 2019-06-27 04:26
Finally, about a year after appearing as part of a Humble Monthly, Stumblehill has been released as a freeware game! It was a very exciting project to work on because I had never done anything quite like it before; using HD art was pretty much a first for me, and making a game as a commission was also very much new.
Anna Magdalino did excellent work on the audio, as did Lucy Green on the writing! Extreme thanks to them for their hard work.
Check the game out on the official site!
