Posts with tag 'Boardgames':
Monthly update: January 2025
Posted on 2025-02-09 13:27
I haven't really been able to do much gamedev with my thumb in a cast, but aside from playing all those Sokpop games I've gotten a bit of boardgame designing done. The design for this particular game, tentatively titled "9 minutes to terminus", isn't quite done, but I nevertheless entertained myself by creating assets for it in Inkscape and printing them at a local print shop. The results look pretty nice, I'd say! I suspect that the game won't be that amazing even once I'm happy with the rules, but it has served an important purpose in that it has helped me overcome my difficulties with designing boardgames for more than 2 players a bit.
Regarding the fractured thumb: I got the Kirschner wire removed & my cast off last Tuesday, and met with a physiotherapist on Thursday on how to train my thumb to get back into action. It's still very much a work in progress, but at least the fracture has healed properly. I feel like I've lost most of my gamedev momentum during the recovery process, but I'll have to try to get back to it. Hopefully I'll manage to restart my weekly streams next week.
Also in other news, a couple days ago I saw Vilma sleeping with her head resting on Fondue's butt:
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Tags: Games, Boardgames, Other, Pets, Regular updates, Art, Streaming
2024 in review
Posted on 2024-12-31 01:44
Here we are again, at the end of the year. I'm looking at the 2023-in-review post as I'm writing this, and right from the get-go I can notice a clear difference in one aspect: 2024 was my most productive year ever, if we calculate that purely by the number of videogames released. Saying this feels somewhat disingenuous due to the fact that most of the Covemountlikes that make up the high release rate were extremely tiny, spur-of-the-moment things, with multiple taking less than a full day to get done. On the other hand, several of the games that account for the previous record unusually-active year, 2009, were also made in just a couple weeks, so in that sense it wouldn't be fair to consider this year "cheating" in some way. I guess with a metric like this the biggest problem is that larger releases that take their time will get unfairly little attention since they fill just a single increment on the bar chart, just like everything else. Oh well.
Alongside the onslaught of Covemountlikes this year saw a couple other releases. Out of those the most notable videogame release was A Solitaire Mystery, although I still intend to get back to it to add some more solitaires and to polish things up further so I'm not quite done with the project. At this point it might make sense to note that ASM was chosen to be showcased at the Experimental Games Showcase at GDC 2025! I won't be participating in person due to the travelling required etc, but it's cool to be accepted in any case. :)
Other than videogames, I made a couple boardgames and paper puzzles. The latter was very much sidelined for this year, although I did occasionally spend time trying to come up with new genres, to no avail. In the boardgame department, Royal Jelly actually garnered some additional interest, as evidenced by 2 people making their own sets (first, second)! This is also the first year I ever entered a boardgame design contest, although my game, Stroll & Hike, didn't fare too well. In fact I made another boardgame for a different contest near the start of the year, but a period of anxiety caused me to miss the deadline and I haven't polished the game up for release yet.
In terms of things not related to releasing creative works, a big change for me this year was that I joined a small group of streamers and we've organized a whole bunch of collaborative streams throughout the year. Thanks to everyone in the possibly-unnamed crew for their kindness!
Another big change was the introduction of Fondue the cat to my life. Apart from me having problems with treating her asthma with an inhaler, I'd like to say that her time here has been positive and she's gained a lot of courage and received a lot of care. Although 2 weeks ago she did swallow a salted peanut and ended up needing surgery for it, the poor cat. She has recovered very well and next Thursday she'll get the wound-licking-prevention jumpsuit off, which I'm sure she'll be very happy about. Vilma has also been doing mostly great, except that her knowledge of being able to demand attention has given me some frustration over the year, haha.
Fondue's not the only one who required medical attention near the end of the year - a couple days ago I fell over after stumbling on some cobblestones and fractured my right thumb. After the cast was put in place the finger hasn't hurt that much, and surprisingly enough I was able to put the final covemountlike together in spite of it. Still, that's 6 weeks of recovery ahead of me, and I actually have to go back to the hospital for additional X-rays because apparently the finger might not be entirely right still. Moral of the story: falling over can be nasty!
A thing that is big for me but probably not anyone else is that I moved my website into a completely new era of design, creating a more dynamic listing for my games, moving my blog away from Wordpress and bringing my art from DeviantArt to my own webspace. It was nice to set this stuff up, and I hope some people other than just me find utility in the website. (Although Hostmonster just announced merging with Bluehost and advertising their AI tools, so we'll see if I'll suddenly need to migrate the whole thing elsewhere, urgh...)
Might that be about it? Next year I think I'll try to concentrate more on slightly larger projects now that this year was themed heavily after making a ton of extremely tiny things. It'd be nice to finally manage to paint again, too, but we'll see about that. ESA2 and Planet Keke will stay on the docket, at least. Happy new year!
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Tags: Games, ESA 2, Planet Keke, Covemountlikes, Small games, Browser games, Other, Regular updates, Pets, Article, Boardgames
A game and a boardgame!
Posted on 2024-12-15 11:08
The year is nearing its end, but there's still time for some updates and games. Behold:
Yup, that's a new covemountlike. The count is now at 29, and I think I'll take some time at the end of the year to concentrate on getting to 30 (or 32, depending on how well things go).
Play Covemouth
I also released another boardgame! This time it's a roll-and-write, which is a first for me. I started making this for fun, if I remember correctly, but quantumpotato from Playlines Games encouraged me to submit it to a design contest over at BoardGameGeek. The game didn't do very well and only placed in one category (7th in the "Multiplayer game" category, although I did receive an award myself for giving feedback); I overcomplicated the rules in the name of thematic considerations and didn't add quite enough variety between sessions to force players to alter their approaches. In any case, I'm quite proud of the game, and it was an excellent learning experience (also in terms of learning how to make vector art with Inkscape!) If you enjoy roll-and-writes, it might make for a fun game or two.
Download Stroll & Hike
The cats are also here.
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Tags: Games, Small games, Covemountlikes, Boardgames, Browser games, Pets, Happenings
Portal Field & Doooors update
Posted on 2024-11-17 19:48
I've had Portal Field pretty much finished for months now, but I've been thinking that I'd like to refine it just a *smidge* before putting it out there; ultimately I ended up not worrying about that after all and just released it, warts and all. The rulebook has gotten some good criticism already so I'll be refining it post-release sometime soon, but it's nice to have the game available in any case.
Download the rules on Itch.io!
I also realized that I could refine Doooors, the puzzle game I released in 2010, fairly easily and did just that! The game has suffered from extremely annoyingly floaty physics and various other nuisances that I for whatever reason never bothered to fix and that take away from the puzzle-solving experience; with this refining I tried to finetune the physics and do some mostly-minor adjustments to make the gameplay feel better. I also added the game remembering your progress. Hopefully Doooors is now a better game to experience, awful title aside.
Check out the new version!
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Tags: Games, Boardgames, Small games, Old games, Ludum Dare
Monthly update: November Tags: Games, Small games, Boardgames, Covemountlikes, Browser games, Regular updates, Other Monthly update: September 2024 Tags: Other, Streaming, Regular updates, Games, Boardgames, Social media, Plans, Planet Keke, ESA 2 Monthly update: July 2024 Tags: Games, ESA 2, Planet Keke, ESA, Boardgames, Regular updates Porti, Baba vinyl & more 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
Posted on 2024-11-16 23:41
The year is nearing its end, but there's still time for some more Covemountlikes! Enter Cellmount, a very clunky puzzle concept test that might be too annoying to play to be really enjoyed but that in my opinion nevertheless showcases some interesting design space. The count is now at 28, so only 2 of these to go!
Check it out on itch.io!
I've also added & adjusted a couple things on the game page: new additions are Mekaaninen Mies, one of my first finished games from 2002, and Pilari, a No More Sweden entry from 2014 that I'm somewhat fond of despite its shortcomings. I also edited the Boardgames section to have a separate link for each game, instead of linking to the collection on Itch.io. I have one 2-player abstract pretty much ready for release so maybe I'll get to do that too before the year ends.
Posted on 2024-09-30 23:58
As mentioned earlier, I didn't make a monthly update in August due to there not being much to report outside of steady progress on my existing projects. The same has mostly continued this month. The art gallery and reaction faces are the big unusual things, but I already posted about those; same goes for the new covemountlike. Darn!
I've been visiting our summer cottage a bunch and foraging mushrooms while there, mainly with my mom; it's been a really good foraging year. Consequently I've been also pondering about various mushroom-themed games, mainly in the boardgame department. I think I have one pretty neat idea related to this, but we'll see if it ever becomes anything. Mushroom-themed boardgames seem to tend to concentrate more on the "picking" part, and I'd want to involve the "identifying" part more in a hypothetical dream foraging game.
Speaking of boardgames, I realized just now that I did forget to post about a new release here! I put a new abstract boardgame on Itch, called Royal Jelly. I posted a picture of it earlier, but it required a bunch of polish and playtesting before I felt happy with it and so the release happened only now. I'm pretty happy overall with the result, though!
Check Royal Jelly out on Itch!
I also submitted another boardgame project of mine, Stroll & Hike, to a design contest on BoardGameGeek due to encouragement from quantumpotato, who has playtested and given feedback on a lot of my boardgame projects over the years. I designed most of Stroll & Hike earlier this year, but it being a contest entry has meant that I've now polished it up a whole bunch. I'll make a formal-er post about the game when the contest is over and/or I feel that the game is ready for release.
As for the longer-term projects, ESA2 and Planet Keke have progressed ever onwards, although I did take a break of several weeks from them due to various factors. Planet Keke has been gaining form in a really nice way, I'm much happier with the engine now than I was some time ago.
As a funny side thing, I sent boxes of Finnish candy to 4 people from the Crew (i.e. streamers I've been doing some game streams with this year) and we did a stream of them trying them out. Sadly none of the others liked salmiak (salted licorice), but Saane ended up enjoying the tar-flavoured candy!
This ended up being actually a whole lot more substantial than I initially expected! That's nice, I was assuming that I'd have kinda low-content updates for several months here.
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Posted on 2024-07-28 15:58
Another month gone, this time with more action on the gamedev front! Mainly on ESA 2 and Planet Keke, of course, but it's been nice to have more motivation again after the slump of June.
Especially ESA 2 has benefited from me having more interest in it again - some long-term points of uncertainty have been cleared up (hopefully), and as a result I have a better grasp of the structure of the game. There are some rooms that I'm somewhat unhappy with that I had made during a time of very low motivation, though; we'll see if I'll rework those or not. Recently a new room had the game slow down from 60 FPS, which is a first and quite worrying. I managed to optimize things a little bit, but I really really hope this won't become a more regular pattern because I'd really rather concentrate on developing the game itself rather than hunting down sources of slowdown.
I also implemented a "planner" of sorts for Planet Keke, to help me keep my ideas for the game together. The game is going to be a lot about moving items between planets and otherwise dealing with inter-planetary light puzzling, and as such having a grasp of what my plans for each planet is has become increasingly crucial as I've gotten closer to actually making gameplay content for the game instead of dealing with the engine.
As for other games, there was a bunch of progress on various side things this month. This includes multiple boardgames - I've had more boardgaming meetings this month than usual, and those inspired me to think about my own designs again. Yay! Still 2-player abstracts, though, I'm afraid.
Somewhat unusually, ESA 1 also saw some work done on it! I'm not sure if I've posted about it here, but ESA 1 has been in a bit of trouble lately in that the Mac version has stopped working entirely, and the Windows build has also been crashing for some players on Windows 11. We've been working on addressing these issues with MP2 Games (thank you!) and the work should be nearly finished at this point. I'll announce more stuff when that becomes relevant.
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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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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??]
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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!
