Posts from year 2024:
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 Monthly update: June 2024 Tags: Regular updates, Games, Planet Keke, ESA 2 Porti, Baba vinyl & more Tags: Games, Boardgames, Baba Is You, Other Monthly update: May 2024 Tags: Games, Planet Keke, ESA 2, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming, Small games, Pets, Other, Browser games New blog up to date! Tags: Other More Forceloop Tags: Paper puzzles Super Forceloop Tags: Paper puzzles Forceloop Tags: Paper puzzles Neltris & stuff Tags: Games, Nordic Game Jam, Ludum Dare, Small games, Browser games, Happenings, Plans, Streaming
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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Posted on 2024-07-09 07:50
A month went by, yet again! I had my birthday and visited the summer cottage with some friends and so on, but game-wise not much happened. I had a phase of low motivation for most of the month, so it was difficult to get much of anything done, but luckily this started going away towards the end of the month (or maybe at the start of July? It's hard to remember).
In any case, ESA 2 and Planet Keke have been progressing at their semi-usual pace. As the previous paragraph implies, said pace has increased a bit over the past week or two, which I'm really happy about! It feels like there have been more gifs to share, too, so the progress has also been slightly more visible.
All in all, though, nothing too exciting. Let's try again next month!
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Posted on 2024-06-20 14:58
I released the first boardgame of the year - Porti! The game's actually been in development since last year, I think, but there was a lengthy timeframe when I wasn't really paying attention to it while it was pretty much finished. It's a tad messy but overall I like the unusual qualities of the rules.
Check it out on Itch!
Also, the Baba Is You OST vinyl has been released by Channel 3 Records as a limited run thing! Happy to have that out.
US: https://ch3records.com/products/baba-is-you
Can: https://www.veryokvinyl.com/products/baba-is-you
EU: https://blackscreenrecords.com/products/baba-is-you
Also, the Google Play Store issue with Baba Is You has now been resolved, so you're able to purchase the game there again. That took a whole lot more time than expected, blah.
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Posted on 2024-05-31 15:15
First monthly recap after moving to the new blog! Once again wonder how hard it is to set up my own image-uploading system...
There are now 23 Covemountlikes in total! Apart from them, the month has been quite slow. Planet Keke has been progressing as usual, but ESA2 has been languishing due to my inability to get regular streams of it going. At the same time, Baba Is You has been unavailable on the Google Play Store due to some bureaucracy-esque nonsense; I hope I can have it handled soon but it's been a bit of a pain in the neck. Hopefully June can be a bit more active in terms of gamedev in general; I feel like I've been a bit exhausted lately.
In other news, I had a very nice housewarming party and have enjoyed my time in the new apartment! Also the cats have settled in nicely - I was a bit worried for some time about Fondue because she was being very scaredy, but that has seemed to have fixed itself with time. A friend also gave the cats a catnip-filled toy as a gift, and I recorded a video of Vilma appreciating it:
Anyway, summer is upon us; let's see what kind of news and non-news it'll offer.
Posted on 2024-05-14 22:20
I've now moved all the posts on the Wordpress blog to this new system; now I just need to gather the courage to make it public (and I'm going to backup the entire webspace before doing that!)
EDIT: Alright, website backed up and blog set live! It's a shame about the lack of comments, but I've been warned very strongly against trying to roll up my own comment section code, and I can understand why. Anyway, so long Wordpress! One thing I still need to do eventually is to replace Imgur links with ones local to my own webspace because I don't entirely trust Imgur to keep them around (especially the older ones that aren't linked to any Imgur account). I wonder how annoying it'd be to set up an image-uploading system...?
Posted on 2024-05-03 16:45
Posted on 2024-05-01 00:06
Before I go to the new type, here’s one more Forceloop:
And here’s the new (variant) type:
This seemed like a very obvious continuation to the idea, so here we are!
Posted on 2024-04-30 02:57
Long time, no paper puzzle! Anyway, here’s one now. It bears a resemblance to both the Gemini Loop & Nikoji types, but has its own flavour. Puzzles:
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Posted on 2024-04-21 15:49
I didn’t end up finishing anything on time for either Ludum Dare nor NGJ (not that I tried, either, for the latter) but I did start a little side project that feels promising, so I guess I’ll be tinkering with that a bunch for a bit. I’ll post more about it when it gets to a slightly more complete state.
However, unrelated to either jam, I made a tiny silly browser game called Neltris and put it on Itch on the Thursday-Friday night! It’s… silly but I quite like it.
You can play it here!
I’ve been failing to get the weekly streams going this year, first due to being sick, then due to Fondue arriving, then due to laziness, then due to moving and then due to Nordic Game Jam [plus some other reasons not listed here]. I have some more stuff in the horizon that’ll affect my ability to stream, but outside of specific events preventing me from streaming I need to step up the game a bit, especially ESA2 really needs that.