Hempuli's blog

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News! And stuff! Part 1
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. :)