Posts from year 2017:
Nolla Games announcement New painting! Tags: Art Weekly progress post #71: Four new levels Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Regular updates, Streaming Weekly belated progress post #70: Some ESA 2, too! Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly progress post #69: Title screen! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly progress post #68: Make Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates, Plans Nightly Visitor Tags: Art Weekly progress post #67: Huge mushrooms Tags: Games, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly progress post #66: Emptiness Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Map generator (open-source!) Tags: Games, Other, Small games, World generator, Procedural generation
Posted on 2017-07-13 17:28
Nolla Games has now gone public!
I’ve been working at this studio for the past 4 or so years mainly as a graphics artist. The studio consists of me, Petri Purho (Crayon physics deluxe) and Olli Harjola (The Swapper). Our secret project, one we’ve been constructing all this time, is almost ready to be revealed, and thus establishing the company behind it is now relevant. As can be seen, we’re dealing with some complicated pixel-based physics simulation here.
There’s going to be an official Nolla Games stream in 11 AM PST 7/13/2017!
We will announce our project on Monday the 24th!
Nolla Games website
Official Twitter
Official Youtube
Press kit
Posted on 2017-07-07 03:01
I’ve been painting a bunch with my girlfriend and just finished this piece; I’ve generally considered myself pretty bad at drawing spruces and creating a sense of distance, but I think both work pretty well in this one! I was really hesitant to add those darker shadows in front of the beetle, but ended up adding them (after encouragement from my girlfriend <3) and I'm very glad I did; the piece is much better with them.
Posted on 2017-07-06 02:16
A new word was added to Baba, and it turned out to allow for some pretty interesting levels; as the title says, I managed to create 4 new ones using this new word, which is really nice! Another new word was on the to-do-list, but I realized that I’ll have to ponder on how to implement it properly because some potentially problematic cornercases turned up. Some new decorative objects (and their respective words, of course) were also added; the plan is to differentiate the game’s map into various visually and mechanically (or difficulty-ally) distinct areas.
I had started a new room in ESA 2 but left it unfinished, so the stream ended with me finishing work on that room and some related story flag things. I’m very very close to the end of the final area, here, although the amount of things I’m not happy with is so long that I’m not sure if this is something to feel good about just yet!
The chat was very lively and encouraging today, thank you a lot! :)
Posted on 2017-07-02 02:24
Unlike I had planned beforehand, today’s stream concentrated on, well, Baba Is You. I redid a couple levels and fixed some bugs. I think I have a good amount of levels now, but more might be coming & the existing ones need enormous amounts of work.
After this I returned to ESA 2 which I’ve really been neglecting for the past couple months; A new enemy was added (as seen above, although it’s still fairly WIP) and I added decorative stalactities/stalagmites with the new prop system. I also adjusted the behaviour of an older enemy to be more predictable. All in all small changes, but nonetheless something.
I’m one stream behind schedule at the moment, so there’ll be an extra stream someday, but it’s hard to say when exactly. We’ll see!
Posted on 2017-06-19 03:50
During tonight’s stream I finished a level and added another, fixed some bugs and added a couple features in preparation for some endgame stuff along with adding a simple title screen in Baba Is You! :) I really should get that test build out soon because a lot of the content left to do is either endgame levels, other endgame stuff, polish or quality-of-life things that can technically wait for later (or can they???) Thanks a lot to the stream viewers for very helpful and kind comments :)
Posted on 2017-06-12 03:37
Today’s stream concentrated once again mostly on Baba Is You; a new word was added along with 3 new levels using said word, some colours were changed and I added more proper names for some levels. I ended up not naming all the levels on-stream since that would have spoiled them to some extent (although I’m not sure if anyone’s interested enough to check them out in more detail). I also added a new tutorial level + restructured the level map slightly.
In ESA 2 I added a little shortcut and a cutscene to go with it – there’s a lot of polish I’ve been thinking of, but I haven’t quite reached the level of motivation needed to pull off most of that. Nevertheless, this little addition was still better than nothing!!!
Baba Is You will probably need another art pass before being finished, but there’s only a little bit of stuff to add before I’m happy enough with it to let some testers have a go at the game. It’d be nice to be able to enter a stage where I’m not adding more content but polishing the existing stuff & adding quality-of-life things such as menus and whatnot sometime soon.
Posted on 2017-06-10 21:12
Finally painted a new fantasy watercolour piece! It’s been a year since I last did so; in the end the motivation came from my girlfriend. :) Black cardboard is good fun to work with, especially when using liquid watercolours. I guess the topic is somewhat generic but I’m very happy about the colours!
Posted on 2017-06-02 05:09
So yeah!! Today’s stream ended up being extra long and during it I ended up adding these props that I can put down where I want to liven up areas. They’ll be extremely helpful with more lush places because apparently it’s very hard (for me) to design an area with heavy vegetation in ESA 2’s tile system & colours. Getting these to work took way longer than I assumed + I ended up having to deal with some performance issues (albeit ones that turned out not to be caused by the newly-added props, or at least not entirely). I really hope I won’t have to spend much time optimizing things, but capsulehero told me some really simple and powerful quick optimizations which I think I’ll definitely be applying sometime soonish.
On top of this a new enemy was added & some adjustments were made, but the props were definitely the big thing of the stream; hopefully they’ll be worth it and not clash too badly with the rest of the art!
Posted on 2017-05-29 01:43
In today’s stream I spent way too long just playing ESA 2, trying to gather all the powerups (and bumping to annoying things, unfinished content and being just generally unhappy about many aspects of the game). Two new rooms were added along with some fixes and a new neutral critter, but I really need to figure out things to make the game feel more lively and/or interesting. It doesn’t help that there’s still a ton of things to get done! I’ve tried to add things quickly with the mindset that I’ll come back later to adjust them, but at this point the general unfinishedness of everything is starting to become a factor that makes development slower. :(
At the start of the stream I also implemented some stuff for Baba Is You. I still feel much more like working on Baba than ESA 2, but I should probably force myself to work more on the latter just to get forward. At least Baba doesn’t have quite as annoying design-related problems (although a whole bunch of design issues of its own). Still, I’m pretty sure I can get Baba done in a reasonable amount of time!
Posted on 2017-05-26 23:19
Well, that sure took a long time! I’ve promised to release a tutorial of how my map generation works multiple times over the years; for various reasons I haven’t managed to fulfill that promise until now. But better late than never, eh?? EH???
I kinda want to add a tutorial for generating towns as well, plus adding names for the different biomes. On top of that, road generation & area-of-influence generation are the two big things missing; the former is basically just A* so it’s not super interesting, but the latter might be a cool thing to add as well. We’ll see! No promises.
GET THE GENERATOR HERE!
The generator is fully MMF2-made, but should run on Clickteam Fusion 2.5, assuming that you have the plugins required. There’s a nice little executable included, so not owning MMF2/CF2.5 doesn’t prevent you from toying around with the generator!
The plugins required are:
– ‘Surface’ by Looki: https://lukasmeller.com/mmf/extensions/beta/Surface1.5.zip
– ‘MT Random object’ by Chris Branch: https://www.clickteam.com/webftp/files/mmf2/Exts/MMF2ExtPack1.exe
I’m not sure how the MMF2 Extension Packs work these days since the program itself has been discontinued; if you can’t install it, tell me and I’ll try to resolve the issue (or contact Clickteam).
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