Posts from year 2020:
Thud! Tags: Art, Boardgames, Other, Games, Small games Progress post #143: GDQ!! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Happenings, Other More coding shenanigans Tags: Games, Other, Small games Funky little scripting language Tags: Other, Small games, Games Progress post #142: Aaghpolishing Tags: Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates Hylics 2 Progress post #141: Some ESA 2, too! Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Tesseract Tapa! Tags: Art, Paper puzzles, Other Baba & Pride Month & Racial Injustice Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Art, Other, Plans, Happenings Progress post #140: Choo choo Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming
Posted on 2020-09-08 00:35
I’m a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and have recently been leafing through his book, Thud!, again. The story didn’t grip me all that much the first time around, but now I’ve grown to appreciate it quite a bit more.
Anyhoo, the book features a fictitious boardgame called Thud. The book lays out some basic rules and features of the game, but leaves out a lot. I had noticed years ago that some people on boardgamegeek (iirc) had tried to construct rules for Thud. I was now struck by the urge to try to do the same, and to help with the testing (& because it felt like a cool and fun thing to do) I decided to build myself a Thud board & the necessary pieces.
I bought two cheap chess sets and repainted one of the boards from 8×8 to 13×13, as seen above. I also combined the rooks & pawns from both sets to get myself enough troll & dwarf units, respectively. A queen was transformed into the central rock structure. Since the cheat chesspieces were quite light, I glued coins under them to give them some nice weight and then glued pieces of an old sock under the coins for padding. The result might be a bit less sturdy than I’d like but it feels nice so far. Also I found an use for a black sock with a hole in it, so that’s extra good.
I’ll post the rules here once I’m happy with them!
Posted on 2020-08-26 08:55
Baba is still coming along; a lot has happened in terms of e.g. bugs being fixed and so on, but at the same time those large milestones of 1) finishing the editor and 2) finishing the upcoming extra levelpacks are still yet to be achieved. But we go forward, and lately I’ve streamed more often and that has been very helpful for progress.
Baba Is You was speedrun by Succinct_and_Punchy at the Games Done Quick online event last week, 21st of August. It was really cool! People seemed to be very excited about the run and in general were extremely supportive. Thank you!
As seen above, among other changes I’ve added two new characters to the game: Fofo and Jiji. I feel that one more character might be warranted but I’m quite happy about these two for now.
Posted on 2020-08-03 04:57
I should’ve realized that a language that’s read as a 2D array in different directions wouldn’t be a new thing, haha. After showcasing my scripting language (see below), some people showed me the esoteric language Befunge and linked me to the esolang wiki, full of really wacky & interesting mystery programming languages.
Boldened by having read about this stuff last night, I spent my sunday making a simple esolang. Above you can see two example codes that both just print “Hello World!”. Sorry about the word choices, it was actually fairly hard to come up with fitting words.
Posted on 2020-08-02 12:16
Inspired by Baba Is You and Zachtronics games, I decided to spend my Saturday evening and the following night implementing a simple, silly scripting language, with a twist! Which is that the code can turn in 90 degree angles. It was a lot of fun to make and I might try to prototype some kind of a small game around it, but for now it’s just a funny little toy.
Posted on 2020-07-06 23:17
I streamed Baba Is You development to see if I still feel. The editor trudges onward, and during this stream I implemented a bunch of polishing touches and fixed many smaller bugs. It’s a terrible never-ending swamp of things to do but at the same time I feel like we’re reasonably close.
I was planning to stream ESA 2 as well, but wanted to keep the stream reasonably short and ended up not doing that after all.
One thing I need to concentrate on sometime soon is work on the two new levelpacks that’ll be released with the editor; I’ve been keeping them on hold for a couple months now and especially the “New Adventures” pack is lagging behind pretty badly by now. Similarly, I’d like to get at least 2 more tunes done for Baba and those take time to get going; I hope I can get them implemented in time.
Posted on 2020-06-28 21:44
[Apparently YouTube doesn't allow embedding this video anymore.]
Hylics 2 by Mason Lindroth has come out! Really liking how it sounds & looks. Check it out on itch.io!
Posted on 2020-06-28 11:50
Streamed some 5 hours tonight, fixing a whole bunch of issues in Baba Is You, but also taking the time to implement a bit of stuff for ESA 2 as well! I’m trying to avoid the issue I ran into previously where my enemy designs are overly complicated and all-purpose and as a result the level design becomes difficult. I’m still kind of learning the scale of the new 8×8 tile size – I haven’t fully internalized how high the player can jump and seeing which passages will feel too cramped and which in turn are too open is tough. Still, progress is progress!
Posted on 2020-06-24 04:57
I was recently introduced to the slightly picross-ish pen-and-paper category of puzzles called Tapa. They’ve been a lot of fun to solve, and way more satisfying to me than, say, sudokus. You can find a lot of them here, with instructions on how they work!
I recently saw someone make a 3D version of a Star Battle, another pen-and-paper puzzle type. Being who I am, I found the concept really intriguing and started pondering if it’d be possible to add one more dimension to the deal. I’m not good or familiar with Star Battles, so I went with the more-familiar Tapa ruleset and did some research & Love2D coding during the midsummer holidays and ultimately ended up with what you see above, the Hypertapa.
Due to how 4D works I had to devise some rather awkward extra rules to make the challenge make sense on some level, but I’ve now confirmed that the solution works so that’s great! Thanks to Deusovi for showing tapas to me and being the first to complete this.
So yeah. That’s how I spent my midsummer holidays (I did also sauna a bunch, visit my parents and eat good food & scratch a dog!)
Posted on 2020-06-17 23:30
I made a whole bunch of Pride flags in Baba Is You! If you’re interested, you can see & download them here (imgur album)!
Baba Is You is also part of the Humble Fight for Racial Injustice Bundle, along with games such as Spelunky, FTL and Hyper Light Drifter! Click the image below to check it out :)
Posted on 2020-06-09 02:19
More streaming! I really need to set up my standing desk again, these past days have caused stomach pains possibly partially because of all the sitting.
I managed to fix a whole bunch of small issues and add handy hotkeys and other quality-of-life features for the editor. The editor is actually starting to feel pretty nice to use, I’d say, and that’s exciting! I also added the train sprite above; not sure why, exactly, but it felt fitting.