Posts from year 2023:
Monthly update: August 2023 Tags: Games, ESA 2, Small games, Planet Keke, Boardgames, Other, Regular updates Grey Room… again Tags: Games, Small games, Paper puzzles, Browser games Monthly(?) Newsletter Tags: Other, Plans, Regular updates, Social media World Puzzle Championship 2022 Tags: Paper puzzles, Other, Happenings 2 abstract boardgames Tags: Boardgames, Games What happened in July Tags: Art, Boardgames, Games, Other, Planet Keke, Regular updates, Small games PIIRI Tags: Games, Boardgames Comic, games + more Tags: Games, ESA 2, Planet Keke, Masjin, Old games, Paper puzzles, Other, Plans, Small games Comic, borthday + paper puzzle collection! Tags: Art, Other, Paper puzzles Equal measures Tags: Paper puzzles
Posted on 2023-09-12 12:39
I really need to do these at the end of the month instead of during the next month, I have a lot of stuff from September I’d want to write about!!
Anyway – last month was mostly fairly uneventful. My game projects progressed, the solitaire collection got another new solitaire (not released yet), Planet Keke got its name and moved along at a slow-but-steady pace, same for Mobile Suit Baba & ESA2.
I’ve had a bunch of trouble lately concentrating on my game projects when not streaming. With this in mind the weekly streams have been excellent, but it has meant that I’ve only done work on my projects a couple hours every week, and that doesn’t quite cut it due to how slow everything progresses at the moment. I’ll need to figure out something there…
My favourite procrastination from videogame dev has become… boardgame dev! I designed about 3-ish new boardgames last month, one of which can be seen above. The design processes might spill a bit over to September, hard to remember. Anyway, I have 3 boardgames that I think are almost ready, but that need a final(?) looking-at, as well as writing out the final rules, before I’m happy putting them available. I removed Malsymmetric from my Itch.io listing because after some thought that one didn’t really feel solid enough. Maybe I should take another look at it…
What else… right, I set up the Mailchimp newsletter thing, and sent the first newsletter at the end of last month! That was exciting! I doubt I’ll have enough content for regular monthly messages, but maybe that’s a positive for most of the people receiving them; makes sense to only send out stuff when there’s something to actually say.
And finally: I graduated! For real this time! I’m now a Master of Psychology, and I also applied for and received official sanctioning so now I’m also a real, proper Psychologist. Nice! I’m planning to join some student events this autumn to get a final taste of university life as a way of saying farewell to that part of my life. I’ll also be drawing a final(?) comic & cover art piece to our student magazine.
I guess that’s it, mostly? As said, it’s hard to remember anymore exactly what took place in August and what’s already September material. Not that any of this really matters, haha.
Posted on 2023-09-06 13:25
I decided on a mostly-whim to export this tiny 2008 escape room game to HTML5, since it seemed fairly trivial and since despite the game’s simplicity I have some fondness for it. Anyway, I did end up having to do some additional work to get the thing rendering at double resolution, but whatever. The game’s likely to take less than 10 minutes to finish.
PLAY ON ITCH.IO
In other news, all but one of the Limited Alike puzzles in my WPC post below were outdated, broken versions; I’ve now updated them all, as well as added a Celltinels puzzle I had missed into the post.
Posted on 2023-08-19 15:51
I decided to finally set up a mailchimp account in order to be able to let interested people subscribe for some kind of news about my games. This seemed prudent since I bet there’s a bunch of people who didn’t want to move from Twitter to Cohost/Mastodon and thus haven’t been seeing any news stuff related to my projects. You can find the subscription page here.
Posted on 2023-08-08 20:24
Last year I was given the opportunity to make some paper puzzles for the World Puzzle Championship, held in Poland. It was suggested that out of the genres I’ve come up with, Celltinels and Limited Alike might be the best suited for the job, so I ended up making 4 puzzles of varying difficulties for both genres (and an extra Celltinels puzzle for reasons I’m slightly hazy about – I think it was an alternative version of the 3rd puzzle in the set in case the first one was too hard or too easy?) This was really cool and I’m happy I was asked to make them! Thanks! I also do hope that my kinda happy-go-lucky approach to puzzle design didn’t cause too much stress…
There was a one-year embargo on releasing the puzzles outside the event, and that has now passed so after seeing the fellow puzzle designer Menderbug release theirs, I thought I’d go ahead and do the same.
First, here are the rules for both genres as reminders:
Celltinels rules, formatted in a very awkward way because this was one of the first paper puzzletypes I ever made. Click for big.
Note! The clue numbers block the “vision” of other clues!
And here are the puzzles:
Posted on 2023-08-08 02:06
I had 2 small ideas for abstract boardgames, and ended up developing them in tandem, kind of. They’re very simplistic but interesting, and as usual it was really fun to make the components. Click on the images above to download them on Itch!
[Elder Dance has since been unlisted on Itch.io due to the rules not quite working; as of 5/2024 I still haven't quite figured out a fix!]
Posted on 2023-08-02 19:02
I guess I could try doing a monthly update, since weekly updates were clearly too difficult for me and several of the past blogposts have been kind of general “what’s been going on” style affairs.
1: Kepi
I released another boardgame! The main motivator for making it was that I had these wooden sticks that felt difficult to use because they were cylindrical and as such rolled really easily. I bought a cheap “Yankee scarf” for 1,5€ in the local dollar store equivalent to help with the rolling, and in the end was very satisfied with the overall look. The game turned out to have some stalemating issues, but a rule addition suggested by pinchazumos seems to have fixed that. Thanks! You can download the rules for free here.
2: First Planet Keke song
I almost-finished the first tune for this game, and decided to make a proper preview video to showcase it! There are little details that I still want to adjust in the song, but overall I’m happy with it. The game has also been coming along pretty nicely, although there’s plenty left to do.
3: Watercolours
I had a small notebook and decided to do some little paintings in it. It was fun to paint again, and the small size ensured that being more haphazard about it didn’t feel bad.
4: Summer cottage
I spent a couple days at our summer cottage. It was neat! Photo not mine.
5: New Baba tactics game work
I hadn’t worked on this for a while, so it was nice to get some new work done on it.
Posted on 2023-07-20 15:57
I posted about this boardgame in 2020 after building the board and pieces; it’s an asymmetric abstract boardgame based on the imaginary game Thud from Terry Pratchett‘s book of the same name. My initial goal was to reconstruct the game described in the book to the best of my ability; I had read about some of the other similar attempts some years earlier, but as far as I know I didn’t really utilize that knowledge in my own design. For example, the initial layout of the units was something that I stumbled into when considering Pratchett’s vague description of the starting position.
Anyway, this first version showed a surprising amount of promise, and I playtested it a bunch in late 2020, polishing the ruleset. Despite being quite happy with what I had then (and having built the above physical board and pieces from 2 cheap chess sets, acrylic paints, coins and pieces of old sock), the worry that the game balance was off in some hard-to-see way gnawed at me and I left the game to wait for later. There were a couple playtests every now and then over the years, but nothing substantial after that initial excitement. One cool detail is that I got a chance to briefly show the game to Vlaada Chvatil when he was visiting the Finnish event Ropecon last year. Thanks for taking a look, Vlaada!
As one might have noticed, this year has been quite active for me boardgame design -wise, and it seemed like a good idea to finally finish my Thud-like. I had already pondered on taking the game away from its origins, because I felt that it was enough of a separate thing that presenting it as a “fangame” would’ve felt a bit unpleasant. I did some more playtesting (thanks to quantumpotato for suggestions and playtesting help) and adjusted the rules quite a bit based on this – the 13×13 board became 11×11, one faction lost a fairly powerful move that seemed to be either overpowered or too weak, and the central Monolith piece became movable. I also changed the names of the components and the game to represent divergence from its origin, and thus Piiri was born.
I’m a bit wistful about the original 13×13 version of the game, so it might be that I’ll return to it at some point to give it another try. However, this 11×11 version seems to work ok, and as such it makes sense that this is the “official release”.
Download the game on itch.io!
Posted on 2023-07-08 00:42
First of all, I made another little comic!
Second of all, I went and updated the website so that there are no more imgur links in the game screenshots; I noticed that some of those links had died and it made sense to go for entirely local images. I should eventually also add local download links for those games that only offer an Itch.io link, I think. We’ll see. I also shuffled the games around a bit because I felt that some notably tiny games were in the “medium games” category and vice versa. Also some games graduated to the “big games” category! I should really rethink the category system altogether…
Third of all, the paper puzzle collection has been updated with the latest puzzle types like Equal measures and Diagaquarium.
Fourth of all – I made Masjin available again! The server’s still dead, but at least you can download the game (and the server hosting tool is likewise available again).
Fifth and final of all, have some screenshots of the games I’m working on:
Posted on 2023-06-23 00:37
I made an extremely juvenile 6-page comic called Wasserkloset Destiny:Ultra! You can read it here: https://www.hempuli.com/comic/?title=comics&id=7
'>'>
My birthday was a couple days ago and a friend made me a cool birthday Baba card! It’s cool!
I’ve also updated the Paper Puzzle collection with the Equal measures puzzles, as well as a new Diagaquarium puzzle. You can see that below alongside another new Equal measures puzzle.
Posted on 2023-06-21 09:57
Hey, it’s been a while since I put out a new paper puzzle type! This one is apparently very close to various other types, especially Belarusian snake; I’m quite happy with how the puzzles feel!
And the puzzles:
1
2
3
4
5