Hempuli's blog

Hempuli's blog
Visit the main site

Dogs
Posted on 2018-01-05 02:50

Someone asked me to draw my favourite animal, so I drew some corgis. I think strictly speaking my favourite dogs would be larger breeds (tibetan mastiffs, for example), but corgis do just fine. The largest one had a reference from the internet.

Tags: Art

Baba Is You and the Independent Games Festival
Posted on 2018-01-03 21:02

Well would you look at that, Baba Is You was nominated finalist in 4 categories at the Independent Games Festival, the largest (?) indie game competition in the world. One of these is even the grand prize! Here’s the full list:

- SEUMAS MCNALLY GRAND PRIZE
- EXCELLENCE IN DESIGN
- NUOVO AWARD (Basically the “innovative experimental stuff” award)
- BEST STUDENT GAME (I’m still a student at the University of Helsinki, mind you!)

So yeah, this is very exciting news for me! Can’t wait to get this game actually done!!!

In related news, I’ll be traveling to the Game Developers’ Conference in March, partially to finally attend this magical event I’ve been hearing so much about, but also partially because I felt that Baba had garnered enough semi-spontaneous interest that it’d be a good idea to show it off in a larger event. Being a finalist in a bunch of categories is a really good additional reason to go, so I guess I’m happy I am doing just that?

Ramble ramble

…back to work.

Tags: Games, GDC, Happenings, Baba Is You, Other, Plans

Ship
Posted on 2017-12-28 05:54

I drew a boat. Not happy with the feet or the perspective but it’s good to draw every now and then.

Tags: Art

Weekly progress post #93: Word
Posted on 2017-12-20 03:02

Today’s stream was really nice and productive! I made some levels, started working on the game’s actual map (and encountered a lot of need for polish, haha), made some groundwork for custom objects, fixed some bugs and in general got stuff Done! I definitely feel that I’m starting to move towards the endgame in terms of actual game content, even if there’s a lot to do besides getting there. Fixing bugs in today’s stream was wonderfully simple, and it was nice to have a feeling of there not being anything that’d be really tough to fix (there 100% is, probably).

I’d like to post a gif but I think I’ll try to wait until I have some less spoilery content to post. Thanks a lot to the chat, it was very active today and made working on the game a lot more fun! :)

Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Regular updates, Streaming

Xlua tutorial for Clickteam Fusion
Posted on 2017-12-18 03:25

I made this for ArtCode on twitter. It explains a bit how the Xlua extension works. Huge thanks to Looki for teaching me how to use lua, and to Justin Aquadro for making the extension!

Get the tutorial here! Windows only.

23

Tags: Games, Other

Weekly progress post #92: The Big Day… and maps
Posted on 2017-12-13 03:19

Alright! Obviously the announcement of Baba was the BIG THING today, but as it turns out I also had the opportunity to stream a bit. Working out how I want the map system to work & accounting for various oddities the users might end up doing with the level editor is fairly tedious but I think I got a good chunk of that handled today. Getting this whole part of Baba’s development behind me is going to be great, although I’m already feeling that the current system is too hacky/rigid so some refactoring might need to take place between now and the game’s eventual release. Eugh. Still, progress!!

People were wondering when I’d return to ESA 2, and while I’m pretty happy to be able to say that it’s officially on a hiatus (mainly in order to avoid extra stress from having to worry about keeping it worked on while concentrating so heavily on Baba) I want not to disappoint those who originally got interested in my works via ESA. So I think I’ll stream some ESA2 dev sometime soon, even if the actual hiatus won’t end until next March or so. Sorry. At least people have seemed understanding, which is very kind & nice.

Tags: Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, Other, Plans, Streaming, Regular updates

Baba Is You’s trailer!!
Posted on 2017-12-12 17:05

Woop! It’s here! I’ve now decided that Baba Is You will be released in Summer, 2018, and the game also has an official website and Steam page now; go wishlist it, you!!

Website: http://www.hempuli.com/Baba/
Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/736260/Baba_Is_You/
Press kit: http://www.hempuli.com/press/sheet.php?p=Baba_Is_You

Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Nordic Game Jam, Other, Plans, Happenings

Weekly progress post #91: Paths
Posted on 2017-12-06 03:55

Today’s stream was slightly aimless & quiet, but I feel that I still got a whole lot done.

I started work on custom object sprites; the idea is that in the finished game the player can make levels with custom objects, and part of this system is the ability to change their spriting. This feature makes also my own work easier, because with it I can make themed levels without having to hard-code every object.

The other big thing tonight was the implementation of “paths”, i.e. routes that connect levels together, seen in the gif above. I’ve always really liked Super Mario World/3 maps and hopefully these new paths allow making more appealing and compositionally sound maps. The idea is that I’ll divide the current large map into several sub-maps, so there is well enough space for a little aesthetical polish like this.

I think I’m only 2 updates behind now?

Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates

Weekly progress post #90: World map
Posted on 2017-11-28 02:28

I hadn’t slept much last night so I was extremely tired at the beginning of the stream. However I managed to persevere, and as a prize for that I got some of Baba’s map stuff actually working! There’s a lot of polish to be added and big features still missing, but I think I have a good idea of in which direction I want to go with the visual design here. I also managed to re-implement the old map in the new map system, which is good for getting a new playable build out.

What worries me somewhat is that there’s some kind of a bug in the level editor; after a while of using it the game either crashes or something stops working. My guess is that I’ve accidentally forgotten to take some tiny lua thing into account and it then accumulates until problems arise, but as with the previous “nothing-works” bug, it’s always annoying to debug something that only happens after a while of playing.

Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates

Weekly progress post #89: Slog
Posted on 2017-11-24 04:36

Today’s stream was spent mostly on updating Baba’s levels into a new format; I had changed the positions of the various objects in the editor’s “reference map”, so to say, so all the levels were just randomish garbage. I had planned to re-do all the levels by hand but talking about it aloud on-stream made me realize that coding a conversion tool would probably be easier. And so it was! Converting all the levels + adding their names back still took a lot of time, phew. I also started implementing the game’s map again; I’m still missing some features to make the map to my liking so for now I’ll just recreate the old map in order to make sure that I have a fully working version of the game handy when needed. I’d say I need one more stream to be at the point where I have the game fully working again, with some jank here and there. After that it’s just a matter of adding the new map features in order to make the whole system work in the way I want.

In other news, I’ve been super into markov chains again and recently revisited my old generator, this time redoing it from scratch with the generation now being done a letter-by-letter level instead of word-by-word. The results are really promising and I’ve had fun generating texts from a public domain cookbook & the script of The Two Towers:

In fact, this stuff has been so much fun that I finally started a twitter account that I can use to share generated texts I find amusing. It’s called @chaingenerator.