Posts from year 2024:
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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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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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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Tags: Games, Small games, Browser games, Covemountlikes
Reactions on blog & gallery
Posted on 2024-09-05 20:09
However, I thought of a way I could still add a little fun interactive thing to the website, so here we are: when viewing a post or a gallery image, you get three options of reactions to add. Effectively they're like likes on various social media services, but I tried to make the options a bit funkier to stay true to the general vibe of the website. I hope you like them!
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Tags: Other, Social media, Art
New gallery page!
Posted on 2024-09-05 03:25
I've been meaning to make a nice gallery page for browsing art I've made for a while now. I've used DeviantArt since something like 2006, but I've been feeling somewhat iffy about the place for a while, + it seems like my general approach to things has been converging towards "make things yourself if you're able", haha. Anyway:
Check the gallery out!
There's still a bunch of art missing, particularly really early stuff, but the "major" pieces that I'm most proud of should all be there already.
(I ended up not making a monthly post for August because there really wasn't that much to write about - game projects progressing, some nice life event stuff, that's all.)
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Multitapa
Posted on 2024-08-30 03:43
New paper puzzle thing! This one is a bit messy but felt interesting enough to turn into a 'full' thing. Behold:
And the puzzles:
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Tags: Paper puzzles
Bits and bobs from Wordpress archives Tags: Games, Ludum Dare, Small games, ESA, Cloud Realm, Other Monthly update: July 2024 Tags: Games, ESA 2, Planet Keke, ESA, Boardgames, Regular updates
Posted on 2024-07-28 18:29
I've been transferring images on the blog from Imgur to my own webspace to avoid a situation where something gets lost forever due to Imgur breaking/deciding to remove it. I looked through the images uploaded to Wordpress over the years, and there were some fun little images I hadn't posted on the blog, which I now put up in their own retroactive blogposts. See here:
April 2010 - An unposted Paradise Fort screenshot
November 2013 - Two images from an old version of Cloud Realm 2
April 2014 - More Cloud Realm 2, plus me at a student party
May 2014 - Early development of a better Cloud Realm 2 engine
June 2014 - Pictures of ESA 1's final boss
Posted on 2024-07-28 15:58
Another month gone, this time with more action on the gamedev front! Mainly on ESA 2 and Planet Keke, of course, but it's been nice to have more motivation again after the slump of June.
Especially ESA 2 has benefited from me having more interest in it again - some long-term points of uncertainty have been cleared up (hopefully), and as a result I have a better grasp of the structure of the game. There are some rooms that I'm somewhat unhappy with that I had made during a time of very low motivation, though; we'll see if I'll rework those or not. Recently a new room had the game slow down from 60 FPS, which is a first and quite worrying. I managed to optimize things a little bit, but I really really hope this won't become a more regular pattern because I'd really rather concentrate on developing the game itself rather than hunting down sources of slowdown.
I also implemented a "planner" of sorts for Planet Keke, to help me keep my ideas for the game together. The game is going to be a lot about moving items between planets and otherwise dealing with inter-planetary light puzzling, and as such having a grasp of what my plans for each planet is has become increasingly crucial as I've gotten closer to actually making gameplay content for the game instead of dealing with the engine.
As for other games, there was a bunch of progress on various side things this month. This includes multiple boardgames - I've had more boardgaming meetings this month than usual, and those inspired me to think about my own designs again. Yay! Still 2-player abstracts, though, I'm afraid.
Somewhat unusually, ESA 1 also saw some work done on it! I'm not sure if I've posted about it here, but ESA 1 has been in a bit of trouble lately in that the Mac version has stopped working entirely, and the Windows build has also been crashing for some players on Windows 11. We've been working on addressing these issues with MP2 Games (thank you!) and the work should be nearly finished at this point. I'll announce more stuff when that becomes relevant.
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