Posts from year 2018:
Weekly-6 progress post #109: Smoothish sailing Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Happenings, Regular updates, Streaming Weekly-5 progress post #108: Snow! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-4 progress post #107: Flowers!! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Regular updates, Streaming Weekly-4 progress post #106: Behind in updates, again Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Happenings, Other jams, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming Text generator! Tags: Games, Other, Procedural generation, Small games Weekly-1 progress post #105: More maps Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-2 progress post #104: New map! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Plans, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-3 progress post #103: Level intros Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Chnakess Tags: Games, No More Sweden, Small games, Happenings News! And stuff! Part 2 Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Happenings, Nordic Game Jam, Procedural Generation, Small games
Posted on 2018-10-16 06:05
Decided to stream to pretend that I’m able to keep up a stable schedule. Despite initial slow progress, I got a lot of stuff done this time around! Tweaking several levels, implementing two(?) new ones, fixing bugs, adding polish, you name it. Developing Baba has felt surprisingly fun even at this somewhat finalish stage of development, and I’m very glad for that. :)
Baba will be at IndieCade Paris next weekend, on Friday and Saturday! If you want to test the game, come there!
Posted on 2018-10-02 06:54
I guess I’ve almost managed to stream every week now? I still want to keep track of missed weeks because once I get to the mood, streaming multiple times a week is a joy & very productive!
Today I started streaming very late and as a result the stream was supposed to be fairly short. It ended up being about 2½ hours anyway, so shoot. Oh well! I got some work done with systems that coul help with Baba’s localization in case that becomes a thing, and altered some menus into using a new system and added a new palette together with a snowy effect, seen above! The chat was fairly lively, thank you for that! Baba has progressed at a really nice pace lately, hopefully I won’t run out of steam. There are no massive hurdles left, I think, although some might present themselves before the end.
Oh, yeah, and since I apparently haven’t mentioned it here, Baba Is You will be released on the Nintendo Switch!
Posted on 2018-09-24 03:53
Life keeps happening! Anyway!!
Today I worked some on this flowery effect that’s part of Baba Is You’s intro & ending. The effect ended up in a pretty sweet spot, although there are some bits of polish still sorely needed for the intro and the ending is very much work-in-progress. I also replaced an outdated level with a better one (with help from people in the chat, particularly PortPonky, Unsinnlos and falcon99999 – thank you! I also did a little bit of work on the game’s menus; the player can now return to the main menu from the game and choose whether they want the game to ask for confirmation when restarting. Not super interesting and I definitely did some of this to procrastinate working on the ending, but it’s still necessary stuff so I can’t be too unhappy about it!
Posted on 2018-09-10 05:30
So, Gamescom happened, as did Sommerhus Jam, and combined with work on Noita I have had a hard time keeping up streams. Managed to have one tonight, though, so maybe this is the time for yet another return to form!(?)
I fixed various issues in Baba, most importantly a relatively long-standing logic issue. I ran into another that I thought I had fixed for good; there was a pretty simple solution available but I’m slightly afraid that said solution causes some other hairy cornercases (that I had previously fixed and forgotten about.) I guess I should document why I’ve done things the way they are at some point.
I also spent some time working on the game’s music; the Forest theme gives me trouble and while I found some new directions, the song will need more work still to get to a state where I’m happy with it.
All in all the stream was fairly productive and I actually finished all the things I had planned to; now just to keep that momentum somehow!
Posted on 2018-08-29 05:31
I polished up a markov chain generator I’ve used to generate e.g. book titles to make it more approachable, and here it is! You’ll have to gather more source texts on your own, but the engine itself should be quite user-friendly, if a bit bare-bones.
GET THE GENERATOR
The generator is also open-source; the engine itself was made with Multimedia Fusion 2, but the generation agorithm is pure lua so you can try to figure out what’s going on there if you so please.
Posted on 2018-08-16 04:46
I’ve actually made good headway at getting back on track with these updates – this is the third stream this week! I had implemented a simple map mockupping tool yesterday, and used it today to plan out the map. It’s hard to say how balanced things are, but I’d say that the situation is way better now than just a couple days ago. I even managed to re-do some long-standing problem levels, with the help of people in the chat. This was the first time I announced a stream using @babaisyou_, and I think that showed in that the chat had more people than usual. Maybe? The stream ended with a little bit of settings menu work.
It’s looking a lot like I’ll manage to catch up to my schedule this week! However, next week I’ll be away so there’ll be no stream, and as a result I’ll have to do a double stream sometime soon. With how useful these streams have been, this shouldn’t be a bad thing, however.
Posted on 2018-08-14 04:10
A second streaming day right after the first! Today I redrew the world map of Baba to account for the increased screen size (from 480×480 to 854×480). After that I polished yesterday’s level intro screen a bit and started some work on making the pause menu neater. I feel that I’m starting to get fairly close to a point where I’m reasonably happy with the content of the game, but there are some of these cases of visual polish still in the way, as well as a particular map design issue I need to tackle (along with some endgame content stuff but those feel less pressing since they’re not relevant for most people playing the game, not at first at least.)
I’m still 2 streams behind so there may be more streaming this week! Perhaps I can get all these smaller issues
in Baba sorted out before the end of the week? That’d be great!
Posted on 2018-08-13 04:23
Wow, the plan for weekly streams didn’t go too well. New try!!
This month is going to be very busy for Baba and thus I want to work on it even while streaming; ESA 2 will have to wait a little while longer. Today I worked on implementing an intro for the levels, seen above. This far you’ve just been plopped into the levels without fanfare, with the level name hovering in the top-left corner. Now, though, you’ll get a fancy text in the middle of the screen (with a bugged level number, no less!) In the past days I’ve been updating the game to use a widescreen ratio instead of the old square shape, and together these changes have added a lot to the polishedness of the game. Sweet! Now just to fix that level numbering…
Posted on 2018-08-07 03:31
No More Sweden 2018 was last weekend, and it was a fairly good time. The venue, STPLN in Malmö, was sweet as usual and managed to be generally not too warm despite the general temperature. I even got to swim in the ocean – there’s a really nice large pier nearby and the water was really comfortably warm.
Anyway, I managed to finish some stuff despite taking it easy and spending a lot of time just chilling and playing boardgames. My themes were Sand Dunes and Chain reaction, which led me initially down the path of creating a cellular automata -style terraforming/citybuilding thing. I didn’t get very far, but here’s a neat landscaping thing:
My plans changed abruptly when someone (whose name I don’t remember :( ) sitting near me showed their idea of a turn-based snake game with the objective being defeating all enemies rather than eating fruit. Seeing this made me think of some concepts regarding roguelikes and chess pieces, and I got the concept of combining chess and snake in my head. I felt slightly bad about drawing so directly from someone else’s idea, but I really wanted to try this concept and ended up making it my entry. The game’s called Chnakess and I think it goes in a fairly different direction than a more general snake-with-enemies would have gone.
The game’s essentially a puzzle game where you try to eat all the chess pieces as the snake. I managed to create several different scenarios with different layouts, and although there are some bugs I think the result is pretty solid as far as 48-hour chill gamejam things go.
So yeah, all in all a very nice weekend. This month will be extraordinarily busy so these little moments of possible relaxation are especially valuable. If I have an empty moment somewhere I might update Chnakess a bit to add more chess elements, such as castling. We’ll see.
Posted on 2018-07-23 00:29
So then, there’s a bunch of other stuff that’s happened gamedev-wise, so let’s list some images!
– Baba’s “programming” system is complicated enough that it allows for making games inside Baba! They lack certain vital stuff but here’re Space Invader, Snake & a platformer! The Space Invader thing was done a longer time ago so it might not work quite as nicely right now with the layout it has there, but the idea should be reproducible. Baba also has a Twitter account now, @babaisyou_!
https://twitter.com/babaisyou_/status/1019692763653312518
– Some more pics of the game. The bottom-most image with the “Empty Is You” showcases one of the more hard-to-grasp elements of the game and it’ll be fun to see if people get them.
– I’ve been toying around with text generation using Markov chain -based techniques. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve generated stuff using movie scripts, cookbook recipes, MtG cards, airline catalogue ads, motivational sentences and book/movie titles. I currently have two engines, one of which is more customized and works better on longer texts, and another that’s less sophisticated but more chaotic and thus a good fit for short texts.
I’ve set up two Twitter accounts for posting generated stuff: @chaingenerator miscellaneous text and @MTGmarkov for MtG cards only. Like so:
https://twitter.com/MtGmarkov/status/983508254528503808
https://twitter.com/chaingenerator/status/1014547954324135936
– I participated in the Nordic Game Jam a couple weeks after GDC! I was still kind of exhausted from GDC and Stumblehill was causing me stress so I didn’t manage to concentrate very well, but I nevertheless managed to make these little prototypes. One is a gam jam simulator showing little jammers walk around the venue with game ideas, fulfilling their basic needs. There’s no gameplay but it’s fun to watch. The other is a cooking game prototype where you can make dishes that get named procedurally. Pretty neat but the idea was too meny-heavy to be fun to implement at a jam. You can find both games on my itch.io page!