Posts from date 2018-8:
Text generator! Tags: Games, Other, Procedural generation, Small games Weekly-1 progress post #105: More maps Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-2 progress post #104: New map! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Plans, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-3 progress post #103: Level intros Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Chnakess Tags: Games, No More Sweden, Small games, Happenings
Posted on 2018-08-29 05:31
I polished up a markov chain generator I’ve used to generate e.g. book titles to make it more approachable, and here it is! You’ll have to gather more source texts on your own, but the engine itself should be quite user-friendly, if a bit bare-bones.
GET THE GENERATOR
The generator is also open-source; the engine itself was made with Multimedia Fusion 2, but the generation agorithm is pure lua so you can try to figure out what’s going on there if you so please.
Posted on 2018-08-16 04:46
I’ve actually made good headway at getting back on track with these updates – this is the third stream this week! I had implemented a simple map mockupping tool yesterday, and used it today to plan out the map. It’s hard to say how balanced things are, but I’d say that the situation is way better now than just a couple days ago. I even managed to re-do some long-standing problem levels, with the help of people in the chat. This was the first time I announced a stream using @babaisyou_, and I think that showed in that the chat had more people than usual. Maybe? The stream ended with a little bit of settings menu work.
It’s looking a lot like I’ll manage to catch up to my schedule this week! However, next week I’ll be away so there’ll be no stream, and as a result I’ll have to do a double stream sometime soon. With how useful these streams have been, this shouldn’t be a bad thing, however.
Posted on 2018-08-14 04:10
A second streaming day right after the first! Today I redrew the world map of Baba to account for the increased screen size (from 480×480 to 854×480). After that I polished yesterday’s level intro screen a bit and started some work on making the pause menu neater. I feel that I’m starting to get fairly close to a point where I’m reasonably happy with the content of the game, but there are some of these cases of visual polish still in the way, as well as a particular map design issue I need to tackle (along with some endgame content stuff but those feel less pressing since they’re not relevant for most people playing the game, not at first at least.)
I’m still 2 streams behind so there may be more streaming this week! Perhaps I can get all these smaller issues
in Baba sorted out before the end of the week? That’d be great!
Posted on 2018-08-13 04:23
Wow, the plan for weekly streams didn’t go too well. New try!!
This month is going to be very busy for Baba and thus I want to work on it even while streaming; ESA 2 will have to wait a little while longer. Today I worked on implementing an intro for the levels, seen above. This far you’ve just been plopped into the levels without fanfare, with the level name hovering in the top-left corner. Now, though, you’ll get a fancy text in the middle of the screen (with a bugged level number, no less!) In the past days I’ve been updating the game to use a widescreen ratio instead of the old square shape, and together these changes have added a lot to the polishedness of the game. Sweet! Now just to fix that level numbering…
Posted on 2018-08-07 03:31
No More Sweden 2018 was last weekend, and it was a fairly good time. The venue, STPLN in Malmö, was sweet as usual and managed to be generally not too warm despite the general temperature. I even got to swim in the ocean – there’s a really nice large pier nearby and the water was really comfortably warm.
Anyway, I managed to finish some stuff despite taking it easy and spending a lot of time just chilling and playing boardgames. My themes were Sand Dunes and Chain reaction, which led me initially down the path of creating a cellular automata -style terraforming/citybuilding thing. I didn’t get very far, but here’s a neat landscaping thing:
My plans changed abruptly when someone (whose name I don’t remember :( ) sitting near me showed their idea of a turn-based snake game with the objective being defeating all enemies rather than eating fruit. Seeing this made me think of some concepts regarding roguelikes and chess pieces, and I got the concept of combining chess and snake in my head. I felt slightly bad about drawing so directly from someone else’s idea, but I really wanted to try this concept and ended up making it my entry. The game’s called Chnakess and I think it goes in a fairly different direction than a more general snake-with-enemies would have gone.
The game’s essentially a puzzle game where you try to eat all the chess pieces as the snake. I managed to create several different scenarios with different layouts, and although there are some bugs I think the result is pretty solid as far as 48-hour chill gamejam things go.
So yeah, all in all a very nice weekend. This month will be extraordinarily busy so these little moments of possible relaxation are especially valuable. If I have an empty moment somewhere I might update Chnakess a bit to add more chess elements, such as castling. We’ll see.