Posts from year 2018:
Weekly progress post #102: Basics Tags: Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates News! And stuff! Part 1 Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Ludum Dare, No More Sweden, Other, Plans, Small games Weekly progress post #101: Good progress Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Regular updates, Streaming, Other jams Weekly progress post #100: Back to ESA 2 Tags: Games, ESA 2, Regular updates, Streaming Maybe weekly? progress post #99: I’M BACK Tags: Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, No More Sweden, GDC, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming, Happenings Have some ESA 2 mockups Tags: Games, ESA 2, Other, Plans A new Discord link Tags: Discord :( Tags: Other Progress post #98: PENGUIN Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Small games, Happenings, GDC, Other, Other jams, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming Link to the discord Tags: Discord
Posted on 2018-07-22 22:33
I streamed some yesterday (a week late), and while I didn’t get to check that many boxes from the to-do-list, good progress was done anyway. Loading, placing and saving objects works again in the level editor, I added some water effects (still barebones) and implemented the basics of enemy interaction. I also made some endgame stuff for Baba.
Posted on 2018-07-22 18:27
UGhghg, even when disregarding the sloppy weekly progress updates, I’ve been extremely bad at keeping this blog up to date with things I’ve been doing! Let’s try to fix that! Here’re some things I’ve made during the past several months:
– I made a game for Ludum Dare 41! It’s called Super Metabolism Bros, and it’s a kind of a mix of Dwarf Fortress -like real-time strategy with autonomous agents and platforming. The idea ended up being very rough and buggy, but it was a fun little thing and part of my long-enduring fascination with autonomous agents in games and pathfinding. FrankieSmileShow played the game on-stream and it was a fun time. I had a lot more plans (bacteria, at least) but didn’t have time for those.
– I had my 2-week Summer holiday a week ago, and during it I toyed around with shaders to create this fake 3D effect. It’s very satisfying to create this kind of stuff, although whether it’ll become anything or not will have to be seen. It’d be neat to make a cardgame or a boardgame with this style! (Alexis Kennedy’s Cultist Simulator definitely inspired me a lot)
– Stumblehill is done! It was featured as a part of Humble Bundle’s Monthly Bundle for July. There were some bugs at launch but they should be gone now, although I do plan to update the game a bit more before I call it fully finished. All in all, the project was fun and while I left things very much too late, the result turned out to be fairly neat. This also helped me a lot to get a feel for digital painting, although digital animation is something that feels way beyond me. Massive thanks to Anna Magdalino for the audio and Lucy Green for the writing!
– After a lengthy break, I’ve returned to work on ESA 2! However, because of various reasons I’ve decided to re-do the game from nearly scratch. I’m going to reuse assets where I can, but it’s still a bunch of work. Sorry about that! But I think the game will benefit from rethought. I’m currently setting up the editor and basics of the engine, but it shouldn’t be too long until I’ll be able to get to work on the actual map again.
– Also, I’ve finally updated ESA 1! Some bugs have been fixed, you can now skip the end credits if you’ve seen them already, and there have been some optimizations to the level loading times that should help especially older computers to handle the game. Many of these little changes have been made with speedrunners in mind.
– Baba Is You progresses onwards, somewhat slower now but nevertheless. I think I’ll do a separate post of interesting Baba gifs and whatnot in the future, but not mentioning it in this general update would be odd. On the video you can heard some tracks I’ve composed for the game.
I’ll also be participating in the No More Sweden game jam again this year. It’ll be held in the beginning of August in Malmö, Sweden. It’ll be good to meet some friends and maybe make some jam games. :)
Posted on 2018-07-01 07:03
Today more work was done on ESA 2’s new editor; layers are now back in along with copying multiple tiles. A new feature is being able to select multiple tiles in the tileset and placing them simultaneously; this’ll make it easier to create multi-tile structures. I also added support for animated tiles and a couple other things. Nothing massively flashy but still, good progress. Hopefully next time I’ll get to work on the gameplay side of things.
As for Baba, I tidied the intro screen up some, adding a neat little background effect and moving some text around to make things nicer and more consistent. Again, pretty small things in themselves, but the effect of having the game look nicer is very noticeable (to me!)
In other news, I talked about Baba Is You at the Jam Jam in Sappee, Finland yesterday. Good fun. My IGF prize things also arrived, I’ll try to post a picture if I remember. Also also, my Summer holidays started! This is very much welcome.
Posted on 2018-06-26 04:49
Today I worked on a new level editor for the new take on ESA 2. Things went pretty swimmingly, and in 3-and-some hours I managed to implement basic tile placement & room creating, saving and loading. Next up will be layers, quality-of-life stuff for tile placement and object placement. I can’t say I’d be massively hyped about doing all this again, but it’s a promising start. Let’s hope the development keeps going at a good pace!
Posted on 2018-06-15 05:05
Ok! After a couple months of almost total silence, I’m trying to get back to weekly updates & streams. Today I worked on Baba’s map art, seen above in its WIP state, as well as restructuring it to make more sense. I kind of dreaded streaming beforehand but it was good fun once I got going. I’ll be trying to stream ESA 2 a bit more in upcoming streams because I’ll need to work on Baba outside of streams as well.
In other news:
– I won the Excellence in Design & Best Student Game awards at IGF! I’m aware that this update is over 2 months after the fact, but looks like I didn’t post about it.
– Stumblehill, the penguin game, is pretty much done! It was quite exhausting to concentrate solely on it so I’m happy that I can soon leave it behind.
– I’ll be going to No More Sweden, the oddly-named game jam, in July!
Let’s see if I can get this to work, now!
Posted on 2018-05-09 12:13
A lot has happened over the past couple months regarding my game development endeavours but I’ve been too distracted/tired to write about them here. I’ll try to get something written sometime soon! It’d be sweet to get the weekly updates going; I wouldn’t want to see this blog go silent.
Posted on 2018-04-23 12:35
Here you go: https://discord.gg/wUaCQxb
It closes after a bit.
Posted on 2018-04-18 20:56
Looks like I accidentally deleted all comments from 2009 (and probably some from 2010) while cleaning old SQL databases and mistaking the comments section of my blog for one. That sucks
Posted on 2018-03-12 03:23
I had a massive 8+-hour stream yesterday and another of some 4-5 hours today; I spent most of those working on the penguin game (now titled “Stumblehill”). I’d like to get the game’s levels done before GDC but that’s looking somewhat unlikely. I finished the second level on Saturday and worked on the game’s map today. It seems that the biggest slowing factor is the need for extra assets, and hopefully the third level won’t be quite as demanding in that regard.
I’ll be leaving for the Game Developers Conference on the 18th of March! From there it’ll be a week of probably outrageous amounts of social interaction and receiving Baba compliments from various directions. I’m not *super* stressed about this but I’m sure it’s a force that affects my mood on the background. It’d be really cool to get a prize in the IGF! The beginning week will probably be mostly work on first Stumblehill, then making sure that Baba works at GDC.
What else… 7drl was last week and I started making some simple prototypes but (maybe luckily?) I couldn’t concentrate on them much due to all this vidyagame hubbub.
Posted on 2018-03-11 11:25
Hi! A bunch of people had requested a link to the new Discord; sorry about replying so slowly. Here’s a 10-person invite:
Link To Discord