Once in Space! That’s the game that originally prompted me to set up the hempuli.com website! I remember Nifflas helpfully making me a simple HTML example for how I could format the page for the game, and I’ve been using that as a template ever since (with some adjustments over the years). That was a hugely helpful HTML file!
Anyway, Once in Space was one of my original “platformers-with-a-twist”, alongside games like Timerocketxby, Flickerstrings & GENERIC Platformer. I was quite fond of it, although the initial 2007 version received some harsh-but-valid criticism from a JayIsGames.com reviewer due to how rough the game was to play.
Eventually, in 2011 (I thought it was earlier), I decided to remake the game. For various reasons that version was ultimately kind of lost in time and space, despite being much much more refined game design -wise than the 2007 original. I’ve been thinking of updating it for a new release for years, but now that has actually happened!
In other news, I put Cavern of Flight, one of my highest-quality Ludum Dare entries on Itch.io earlier this year; the game had had a very unfortunate visual bug ever since release where respawning after dying would commonly require you to hard-restart the program. I fixed that for the Itch.io release, but there were a couple additional issues with its design that I didn’t bother fixing at the time. However, while I was still excited about putting OiS 2022 out, I went and actully fixed those issues, making the game a much less rough experience to finish. So that’s two old games now available, better than ever!
Hmm. There was a time when I actively didn’t understand the purpose of Twitter, but as I’ve gotten more into “professional” game development, its utility in sharing my work (and shitposting) has become more apparent to me, and despite the various issues with the site, for the past couple years I’ve mostly appreciated its existence. Especially maintaining the Baba Is You official Twitter account has been quite rewarding apart from some specific bad experiences.
Anyway, as it is, Twitter’s future looks somewhat uncertain, so like a lot of other people it seemed prudent to set up some alternative social media accounts for possible future use. At the moment my plan is to still use Twitter and just mirror relevant posts to these other sites, but we’ll see if that’ll change in the future. And who knows, maybe this means that I’ll post more here on my blog in the future?? Life can be odd like that.
Exuno & Goost from the Mystery Fun House blind speedrunning community inspired me to make a lawnmowing-based game. After some jokey lawnmowing crossover suggestions, I started feeling that I wanted to actually make one of them real, and proceeded to spend the rest of the night programming a simple HTML5 lawnmowing-minesweeper hybrid. And this is it! Based on Mamono Sweeper, which you should definitely check out!
I made a small puzzle metroidvania as a part of the Click-or-Treat Halloween bundle this month! It was fun to make a silly side thing, although I did end up crunching a bit to get it done in time.
La-Mulana is a game I like a lot and that inspired me a bunch. I really enjoyed the second game, especially its soundtrack, but when it comes to the first, I always preferred the “classic” version, i.e. the original MSX-like game, over the remake. The remake looks great and adds a metric ton of quality-of-life upgrades, but the original has also a great style of its own and honestly I quite prefer the soundtrack there.
Anyway! When there was just La-Mulana classic, I found a random website that listed a bunch of info about the game, as well as a download link to the game’s official jukebox. This being La-Mulana, a special password was required to unlock the full soundtrack even inside the jukebox. I’m not sure I would’ve had the patience to find it on my own, but luckily for me the password was listed on the website. I haven’t been able to find the jukebox on the internet later, once the remake came out; I wonder if it’s still available via some official means?
A cool detail about the full jukebox was that it features dev commentary from Naramura and Samiel for every song. The commentary is in Japanese, and in the past I ran into the problem that if I tried to copy the text from the jukebox, differences in encoding would render it unreadable. A Japanese-speaking friend helped me solve this some years ago, but I never bothered extracting & re-encoding the entire commentary until now.
I’ve now extracted the entire thing and run it through Google Translate. The results aren’t very convincing, but maybe I can eventually get an actual translator to go through the Japanese text to get a better version. For now, I’ll link both the Japanese text & the Google-translated versions here. Note that all songs titled “Extra” (as well as some words the end of the final “fearless challenger” song’s title) were in Japanese, but because they were on a drop-down menu, I wasn’t able to copy-paste them in order to get their re-encoded versions; I decided to instead just make up placeholder titles.
It hasn’t been too long since I last updated the collection, but I’ve now added new Bricklayer puzzles as well as Piirilevy & Uncheckers into the mix! Also when looking through the file, I remembered that LITSAlike is still missing its puzzles. Should get back to that.
Hi! I finally drew a comic in English again. I’ve been drawing Finnish comics for the student magazine 4 times a year for years but been wanting to do comics stuff for online audiences as well. I’m not sure how common these will be, but hopefully I’ll manage to hit some kind of a structure in comicsing.
I’ll be accumulating random comics here: https://hempuli.com/comic/comics.php
Hey! Another new game only a week after the last! Now to be fair, this one I made originally a year ago for Ludum Dare 48. However, I’ve since added polish, undo, new levels, music and so on, so this new release is quite a bit neater than the original. Unfortunately only Windows is supported, though.