News and stuff Tags: Games, ESA, Excavatorrr, Plans, Art A new review of CWOUN! Tags: Games, ESA, Excavatorrr, Other, Happenings, Nordic Game Jam, Plans SPOOOKY ESA & CWOUN stuff Tags: Games, ESA, Excavatorrr, Art [SPOILERS!!] Lo and behold, Masjin news! Spaceships! General Discussion Tags: Other, Social media Rambling about ESA Tags: Games, ESA, Plans, Article Mushrooms and spores Pages
Posted on 2014-03-02 04:35
I feel that I remember to update the ESA twitter and TIGforums devlog more often than this blog. Sorry about that! I’ve tried to focus on ESA to get that out of the way, to put it rudely.
Have a GIF!
Anyway, the reason I wanted to post is that I want to gather some opinions on CWOUN. Mainly, I’d like those 3 of you who read this blog to answer the following question:
What are the hardest things in the game AKA What thing(s) kill you most often?
I’d like to eventually start updating that game again, and it’d be neat to make it a bit more accessible. Comment on this post if you feel like it!
Also check out these amazing CWOUN fan-arts:
(Source: imgur, drawn by Meh)
Posted on 2014-02-16 01:21
The blog has been relatively silent for a moment. Let’s fix that!
CWOUN got a really neat review over at the RETRO SPIRIT GAMES blog. Go read it by clicking here! Basically the review points out the main problem with the game – it’s too hard. Ugh. I’ll update the game with some updatey updateness once ESA is at least nearly complete.
As for ESA, I was on a trip for a week and thus wasn’t able to keep working on it. However, I’m back, and so’s development. I’ve reached the 90% mark, and decided that after this I’ll try to refrain from using a percentual calculator for measuring the game’s state, since at this point things get a lot more uncertain due to there being so much polishing to be done everywhere, even if the actual content was done. There’re only two rooms to complete before getting to the final boss, so that’s very cool!
I made a list of things that need to be added after the final boss is done!
Nordic Game Jam 2014 is going as I write this, but unfortunately I was unable to attend this year. This saddens me a lot, since that’s easily the best game jam I’ve ever participated in! The other trip I was on kind of drained my money (not to mention energy), so I had to pass this time.
Posted on 2014-01-25 22:25
Posted on 2014-01-20 13:53
A player actually found the *ultimate treasure* of CWOUN. Good job! Have some ~official developer-made fan art~:
I also made a neat little graph to illustrate how ESA has progressed throughout the years:
(Broken image)
Currently the game’s at 86%! I think I’ll stop using percents once I hit 90%, since the final polishing etc will probably take quite a while.
Posted on 2014-01-17 04:40
I’m quite happy with how it looks!
Also I recently got a couple game ideas I think to be quite neat. Maybe there’ll be a game made out of one of them? Who knows!
Posted on 2014-01-13 19:52
So I finally took my time and contacted the creator of the Lacewing protocol, and it turned out that the server hadn’t died but instead moved to a different address. So well, without any other additions, here’s the The server is alive! update! The last couple versions have also been otherwise broken, but that matters not since the server was unavailable anyway.
GET THE UPDATE HERE!
For reference, the server and port the game uses are
villy.net
6121
Posted on 2014-01-13 03:14
Posted on 2014-01-10 15:48
Note: If you’ve left comments on this blog and want them removed or want to receive all the data stored about you on the blog, send e-mail to mail@hempuli.com! More info here.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESAdevlog
Cohost: https://cohost.org/Hempuli
Mastodon: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Hempuli
Twitch Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/hempuli
(Editor's note: this post was pinned to the top of the Wordpress blog, hence it being up-to-date to year 2023 despite being originally posted in 2014)
Posted on 2014-01-09 07:11
Turned out that writing ‘articles’ about problems in my own games was fun and seemed to get a positive response and actually really nice feedback, so let’s have ESA design problem huffery-puffery #2!
I just played around in the temple area to test some stuff (small dust particles as you walk in the aream yay!), and man is the area horrendous. I could really feel my disinterest in working on the game as I walked around there. I had planned for the area to be mainly about puzzles and traps, and there were those (especially the latter), but they were almost universally obtuse, unfun and often very player-unfriendly, designed mostly without thinking of how a player first seeing them might react. To list some of the horrible things:
- Insta-kill traps
- Another trap that deals 10 damage at a time where the player might have 15
- A puzzle with the only hint located on another room’s wall, said room being also hidden and the hint being partially blocked by tiles
- Two bosses being literally one room from each other
- A boss having insta-kill traps between it and the next save point, so that the player might instantly die after beating the boss but before saving
I felt really disappointed at myself. At the moment I feel that the only way to really approach this problem is to actually redo most of the temple. Redesigning the area shouldn’t be that difficult, considering that I know where the area starts and ends, and all the things that should be found within. Still, it might be quite a large undertaking, although it’d probably pay off very well.
I have some ideas on how this might be improved; it’d probably require redoing some of the enemies and most of the area itself, but all in all I think it could be worth it. I’ll probably finish the penultimate area first, though!
(To be honest, the temple tileset is also quite ugly.)
Posted on 2014-01-05 20:58
First Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 Next Last