Posts with tag 'Baba Is You':
Porti, Baba vinyl & more
Posted on 2024-06-20 14:58
I released the first boardgame of the year - Porti! The game's actually been in development since last year, I think, but there was a lengthy timeframe when I wasn't really paying attention to it while it was pretty much finished. It's a tad messy but overall I like the unusual qualities of the rules.
Check it out on Itch!
Also, the Baba Is You OST vinyl has been released by Channel 3 Records as a limited run thing! Happy to have that out.
US: https://ch3records.com/products/baba-is-you
Can: https://www.veryokvinyl.com/products/baba-is-you
EU: https://blackscreenrecords.com/products/baba-is-you
Also, the Google Play Store issue with Baba Is You has now been resolved, so you're able to purchase the game there again. That took a whole lot more time than expected, blah.
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Tags: Games, Boardgames, Baba Is You, Other
2023 in review Tags: Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, Planet Keke, Small games, Boardgames, Paper puzzles, Noita, Other, Regular updates, Pets, Article Monthly update: December 2023 Tags: Games, Small games, Planet Keke, Boardgames, Baba Is You, Regular updates Monthly update: Sectovember 2023 Tags: Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, Boardgames, Other, Regular updates Baba Is You update 1.11 on Nintendo Switch (version 477) Tags: Games, Baba Is You Stream painting! 2 Tags: Art, Baba Is You, Streaming Stream painting! Tags: Art, Streaming, Baba Is You Games progress Tags: Games, ESA 2, Baba Is You, Planet Keke, Small games Baba Files Taxes Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Small games 2022 in review(?) Tags: Games, Small games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, Happenings, Plans, Other, Old games, Browser games, Paper puzzles, Streaming, Article, Art
Posted on 2024-01-07 08:17
So! Another year has passed. After 2022’s productivity, 2023 followed more on the footsteps of 2020 and 2021 in that I got very very few games released. However, this comparison feels somewhat unfair because I was still working on multiple projects throughout the year, and Mobile Suit Baba was the fruit of those efforts, ending up being quite a bit more ambitious than I initially planned. I also worked on Noita again, adding some more content. Thanks to Petri & Olli for letting me do that!
2023 also saw me getting into boardgame development more seriously. I’ve been dabbling with trying to make my own boardgames/cardgames since childhood (I have about 5 different imitations of Magic: the Gathering & the Pokémon Trading Card Game I made back then stashed in a cupboard), and Petri Purho (from the Nolla Games team) and Erik Svedäng (developer of Blueberry Garden & Else Heart.break()) inspired me further by making boardgames at various game jams. However, during adulthood I’ve never really gotten past the initial stages of design due to impatience, lack of skill, and other factors. Me and Petri developed 2 boardgames together somewhere around 2013, but the first time I got close to actually releasing something was with Piiri in 2020, although that too went unfinished at the time.
Considering the above, me being able to develop so many boardgames to a state where I felt confident enough to put them available online last year felt really nice! Mostly the boardgame design motivation came from procrastination regarding videogame development, but I can’t complain too much about that since the end result was still creative work being done on something I was happy with. The impatience and lack of skill are still present, though, and as such my boardgames have stayed very carefully in the land of 2-player abstracts. Maybe this year I’ll go further?
2023 was also the year of books for me. I started trying to read more in 2022, and once the habit was formed, it was great to get through a lot of new stuff after years and years of re-reading the sam books over and over. In total I read 24 titles last year, although some were very short affairs.
Anyway, here’s the total list of stuff I released last year:
- Baba Files Taxes
- Cylinders of the Wise
- Obsidian Sentinels
- Malsymmetric (technically unfinished because I wasn’t happy with the design)
- Equal measures (paper puzzle)
- Piiri (mostly designed in 2020)
- Kepi
- Elder Dance (technically unfinished because the rules were broken)
- Kurote
- Gnome Thicket
- DIAGORT
- Flatdog Scuffle
- Mobile Suit Baba
- LITSilly (paper puzzle)
Last but not least, 2023 was also the year I finally got a pet, although a better term might be that a pet was got-ed at me. Vilma has been getting more used to me and my apartment, and lately I seem to have figured out what kind of scratching she likes, and she has also started to spend more time lying next to me while I sleep. It’s funny how years-long plans to get a dog turned out like this. Oh well!
For 2024, I have plans to try to release more tiny games like in 2022. However, ESA 2 and Planet Keke are on the table still and especially ESA 2 needs all the attention I can give, so I’ll have to be mindful of that when I decide to dedicate time to sideprojects. I’m sure something’ll work out, though.
Off to a new year we go!
[Wait, nothing about the graduation in this??]
Posted on 2023-12-23 07:01
Hey look! I didn’t miss the timing!
Anyway, big news first: Mobile Suit Baba is out! Really glad it didn’t take a year, but it got close. I want to add a bit more in terms of modding support and such, but after that it’ll be time to return to Planet Keke.
You can find the game here!
I also finished Flatdog Scuffle, another 2-player abstract boardgame! The rulebook will need some clarifications and illustrations, but the game seems to work pretty nicely.
See the rules here!
Posted on 2023-11-30 23:18
Sectovember! Gotta love that month!!
To be honest, not too much has happened over the past three months. Mobile Suit Baba trudges ever onwards, Planet Keke has been on hold to give more time for the former, blah blah. The most significant change over here has been Vilma’s introducton to the ecosystem. This has gone mostly fine, I’d say.
I ran playtests of two more-than-2-player boardgames; one is a more eurogamey deal, while the other is a roll-and-write. Unsurprisingly the eurogame design didn’t work very well on the first playtest, while the RnW showed more promise. I’ve been excited abour Ledergames‘ Root again, and pondered about something inspired by it and My City.
I removed Elder Dance from Itch.io since it turned out that the design had some very glaring issues. I have an idea for how to address them now, but said ideas need more testing.
ESA 2 has also progressed at a ponderous but nonetheless existent pace. I’ll need to refactor the moving platform code sometime soon, and this prospect isn’t one I look forward to.
I decided to finally record a playthrough of the old 2006 demo of Spud’s Quest by Chris Davis. It’s a klik-based game that’s close to my heart and virtually impossible to find online anymore, and as such showcasing it to a larger crowd seemed like a fun idea. I’ll do a playthrough of the full game as well at some point.
Watch the Spud’s Quest demo playthrough here!
Posted on 2023-04-11 16:00
- Cliff now tiles more nicely
- Added Paper and Scissors
- Fixed Museum not granting the “fully completed” star
- Fixed a case where an object could be renamed in a way that caused bugs
- ï and ë were swapped in the font
- Fixed “X Write Word” parsing as “X Is Word”
- Fixed one of Museum’s maps having unclear level icons
- Added a new level in Museum of Unused Levels
- Fixed Feeling & Not Feeling combining in a buggy way in certain cases
- Fixed Empty being unable to move twice in a turn
- Fixed a small coding error with Fear
- Fixed Empty Is You And Win And Defeat not winning even if there’s empty space left after Defeat activates
- Added some safety code for undoing after a Level icon has been destroyed
- Fixed a HUGE bug related to an object transforming to multiple objects in a single turn
- Fixed a largeish letter- & stacking-related issue
- Fixed X Is All being applied on level start
- Fixed Revert and and endgame word not working together
- Fixed two Level, Bonus & Safe interactions
- Removed some accidental duplicated code
- Fixed Empty transformation -related lua error
- Fixed “Without Not X” not working correctly
- Fixed “Empty Is All” not working
- Fixed Empty Is Revert erroring
- Objects made via “X Is All” now revert back to X
- Fixed Empty Is Not Empty erroring
- Fixed X Write Not Y causing bugs
- Added Arm
- Added Bunny
- Fixed an issue with viewing the intro cutscene
- Added Snail
- Fixed “X Is Y And All” causing bugs
- Fixed Word not behaving in certain undo conditions
- Added Simplified Chinese translation into the game
- Fixed issue with level thumbnails bugging out
- Fixed a crash related to 3D
- Fixed a rare bug where beating a levelpack could cause another levelpack to save data wrong
- Made levelpack completion icons not leave empty spots between each other when browsing them via the “Start the game” menu
- Fixed some small visual bugs in the credits
- Fixed a rare case where the level unlocking animation could be buggy due to the Broken quality
Posted on 2023-03-16 06:47
Baba coming out of their well to destroy all existence (1896, watercolours on paper)
Like with the previous piece, I had done the lineart for this already in 2020, but it took me this long to actually get to painting it. The stream painting setup worked ok again!
Posted on 2023-03-11 07:04
I tested painting on-stream, and it produced this thing! I did the lineart almost 3 years ago but never got around to colouring it. I have another similar, slightly larger piece waiting for colours so I’ll probably do another painting stream later.
Posted on 2023-03-09 05:14
Posted on 2023-01-04 07:29
Welp, it’s only 4 days into the new year but here I go again! I started working on this around ~Summer last year, but as my year-in-review post indicated, I wasn’t feeling entirely well then and left the idea on a very rough state. Even in my reinvigorated state, working on the engine didn’t feel entirely enjoyable, in part because of how custom-made everything needed to be. Anyway, I slapped things together to an acceptable state and now it’s finished!
Download the game on Itch.io!
Posted on 2022-12-30 03:27
Ok! I’ve been promising a general “what’s going on” post for a while now, and I guess it’s time to write exactly that. When this year started, I had a couple specific plans for how I’d handle my game development throughout the year (and in some cases onwards from there):
- I intended to start a more structured weekly schedule, sleeping times included, in an effort to both differentiate my free and work time better and to get my terribly unstable daily rhythm under control.
- I planned to make a small game every month for a total of 12 small games, both as a way to try out this system I had first seen used by Petri Purho in… 2007, was it? and in order to take a mental break from Baba Is You and other large, multi-year projects that had been on my mind over the past years.
So how did all this turn out? Not very well. The structured schedule and the monthly game system both fell apart already in January. I couldn’t get myself to stay awake long enough if I woke up early, and preferred going to sleep when I felt tired, sleeping through the day and then being awake overnight. The first monthly game I had planned, a refined version of my earlier Ludum Dare #47 entry Keke’s Underwater Adventure, turned out to be way too large in scope (and most of the other ideas I had picked for monthly projects had the same issue, I suspect) and while I did get some stuff implemented, by the end of the month things were way too unfinished to call the result a success.
So yeah, not great. I don’t remember the exact order of events at this point, but I think I decided pretty quickly to try to make 12 small games over the year in total instead of trying to make one game every month. As for the weekly schedule, it seemed that since the issue was mostly feeling tired (and a decade of getting used to being a night owl), I was better off trying to live with it for the time being, especially because on top of tiredness I was noticing a slightly concerning lack of energy to make things. I did eat more than a half of a Carolina Reaper chili, though!
I had a plan for an April’s Fools game (two, in fact!) but the aforementioned lack of energy posed a fairly serious obstacle because I couldn’t muster the will to make either game happen on time. Luckily later in April I participated in Nordic Game Jam, which allowed me to actually finish a project, RUDE CHESS. I guess this triggered further productivity, because over the weeks following RUDE CHESS I managed to also finish It’s A Me, Baba Is You XTREME (one of the two April’s Fools games), Baba Friend and Keke in the Caves of Peril. Yay!
Before NGJ I started having constant restless leg syndrome, which further caused trouble with sleeping and keeping my daily rhythm straight. I often had to tire myself to get any sleep at all, and after the above burst of productivity, over the Summer I fell into a serious lull in motivation, resulting in me stopping bi-weekly gamedev streams and not really feeling like working on games at all for ~3 months. Ugh!!! I did manage to do some paper puzzle design and comics drawing in the meantime, but something was seriously not right.
October drawing close, I was contacted about a plan to make a small bundle of Halloween-themed games. This seemed like a potentially good way to get back on track gamedev-wise and I agreed, deciding on a whim on my game idea (or maybe it was more than a whim, I can’t remember. I think I had come up with the idea slightly before and decided to use it because it seemed funny?) Around this time I also had some blood tests taken and it turned out that I had a serious iron deficiency both in terms of hemoglobin and body iron reserves. And would you believe it, this turned out to have been the issue all along: getting some extra iron gave me motivation & energy back, and the restless leg syndrome went away, too! What’s funnier, a friend had recommended having my iron levels checked just before this (advice which I didn’t heed). Lesson of this story is: don’t get iron deficiency.
With the iron issue sorted out, I managed to finish The Plumber Thing, and this then led into a bunch of unrelated small games: Mamono Mower, Cavern Sweeper, Babataire, Babataire EX, a rerelease of Cavern of Flight, a rerelease & update of Once in Space, a holiday update to The Plumber Thing, some paper puzzles and finally It’s A Block-Pushing Game, fulfilling the goal of the year (or not, depending if the rereleases count). Overall I’m really happy with this year’s productivity, which is a bit surprising considering the iron deficiency. I also recorded a playthrough of a game I liked as a child, Lost Valley.
There are a couple things that were left somewhat or entirely unfulfilled over the year:
- Most of the games I did end up making weren’t part of the original list of monthly games. As stated, most of those were too scope-creepy for this project, but nonetheless.
- My sleep schedule is still mostly terrible, and I didn’t get enough exercise this year, spending most of the time sitting at my computer.
- I didn’t paint almost at all! And I mostly drew just the usual 4 comics I make annually for the student magazine. I mean, that’s definitely something, but I’d want to do some watercolours again.
And now, what’s planned for the next year?
- I’ll keep making some smaller games, although this time without an explicit count I’d aim for. There are a couple ideas I think I should be able to get done with semi-limited trouble, so hopefully at least some of those can become reality.
- It has started to feel that working on ESA2 might actually be fun again. Maybe? We’ll see! I’ll try to make ESA2 my main project next year, and actually get that thing somewhere instead of it staying forever in a limbo of sorts.
- The weekly streams will return; hopefully this time I won’t lose steam halfway through.
- I think it’s time to move on from Baba Is You, at least for the time being. Next April I’d have spent about 6 years of my life around Baba, and while it’s been largely an enjoyable ride (and I do have Baba-related ideas for the future, about which I’ll post when they’re ready to be revealed), it’d be nice to feel that the game as it is now is more or less a “finished” product. Note that this doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything more with/to BIY, but rather that I’d wish to mentally move on from the game and get the feeling that it’s where I want it to be.
- My internal deadline for getting my master’s degree in Psychology has been set to the beginning of April. There’s so little left!
- I’ll try to exercise more.
Here’s a list of the games released this year, alongside the source of inspiration for them (if I can remember it):
- RUDE CHESS (A combination of pondering about randomness as a puzzle mechanic and my earlier No More Sweden 2018 entry, Chnakess)
- It’s A Me! (A joke I made in AuthorBlues‘ Twitch stream chat and then realized sounded actually funny)
- Keke in the Caves of Peril (My entry for Ludum Dare #48 finished and polished)
- Baba Is You XTREME (Idea for an Aprils’ Fools version of Baba Is You)
- Baba Friend (Based on that old desktop sheep toy, I’ve wanted to make one of these since forever)
- The Plumber Thing (Can’t remember the exact thought process leading to it)
- Mamono Mower (Exuno, Goost & Maurice from the Mystery Tournament community joked about odd combos of genres + the community has an inside joke about Lawn Mower, a NES game. Heavy inspiration from Mamono Sweeper)
- Cavern of Flight rerelease (A 2016 Ludum Dare entry, which I edited slightly to remove some game-breaking bugs and rough edges)
- Once in Space 2022 (Updated version of Once in Space from 2011, which in turn was a remake of Once in Space from 2007)
- Babataire (An idea borne out of Cluj solitaire, which I saw in the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection)
- Cavern Sweeper (A separate concept for Mamono Mower that I wanted to explore but removed from the lawn-mowing theme)
- Babataire EX (A serious attempt to combine Baba Is You and solitaire)
- It’s A Block-Pushing Game (Possibly started as a chess-themed sokoban idea? Can’t quite recall)
Maybe that’s enough of that?
