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!
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.
Another covemountlike! The pace has really slowed down, but if we count in RUDE CHESS and IT'S A BLOCK-PUSHING GAME the count is at 27, and as such I'd be really happy to reach 30 before the end of the year.
In other news, I updated the games list on my website to use the same basic system I coded for the art gallery & this blog. The new games can fit much more games and includes a tag system for easier findability, so I've added some games that were previously missing in there and will probably add some more.
I've been foraging more mushrooms and decided to try out a traditional drying method of hanging the mushrooms on a string. It seemed to work very well, and the dried mushrooms make for a neat decoration, too! I must do more of this next year. I've also photographed some other mushrooms I saw:
A new covemountlike! It was nice to make a really tiny thing again after months of working on Planet Keke & ESA2. Hopefully there'll be more sooner rather than later.
First monthly recap after moving to the new blog! Once again wonder how hard it is to set up my own image-uploading system...
There are now 23 Covemountlikes in total! Apart from them, the month has been quite slow. Planet Keke has been progressing as usual, but ESA2 has been languishing due to my inability to get regular streams of it going. At the same time, Baba Is You has been unavailable on the Google Play Store due to some bureaucracy-esque nonsense; I hope I can have it handled soon but it's been a bit of a pain in the neck. Hopefully June can be a bit more active in terms of gamedev in general; I feel like I've been a bit exhausted lately.
In other news, I had a very nice housewarming party and have enjoyed my time in the new apartment! Also the cats have settled in nicely - I was a bit worried for some time about Fondue because she was being very scaredy, but that has seemed to have fixed itself with time. A friend also gave the cats a catnip-filled toy as a gift, and I recorded a video of Vilma appreciating it:
Anyway, summer is upon us; let's see what kind of news and non-news it'll offer.
I didn’t end up finishing anything on time for either Ludum Dare nor NGJ (not that I tried, either, for the latter) but I did start a little side project that feels promising, so I guess I’ll be tinkering with that a bunch for a bit. I’ll post more about it when it gets to a slightly more complete state.
However, unrelated to either jam, I made a tiny silly browser game called Neltris and put it on Itch on the Thursday-Friday night! It’s… silly but I quite like it.
I’ve been failing to get the weekly streams going this year, first due to being sick, then due to Fondue arriving, then due to laziness, then due to moving and then due to Nordic Game Jam [plus some other reasons not listed here]. I have some more stuff in the horizon that’ll affect my ability to stream, but outside of specific events preventing me from streaming I need to step up the game a bit, especially ESA2 really needs that.
I haven’t updated the blog in a bit, but this time there’s actually a reason for this! I’ve been intending to eventually migrate my blog away from WordPress, and have been setting up a homemade thing for viewing posts & then migrating old posts into the new system. I vaguely thought that after starting this process, the next blogpost would already be in the new system and as such didn’t log in here for a bit. But it’s been long enough (partially because I don’t entirely trust how good my PHP/PDO code is) without the new blog coming online, so let’s make a normal update here instead.
First of all, A Solitaire Mystery is now fully out! It boasts 23 solitaires at the moment, but we do have plans to add more at a later date. You can get it for USD $3 on Itch.io:
That’s my first proper Löve2D release, too! There are a lot of little odd spots in the codebase, but overall I think I’ve built a relatively nice basic system for future lua games. Thanks to Hazelstorm and knexator for the guest solitaires & to Hazelstorm for the excellent music!
In other news, the number of Covemountlikes has reached a whopping 16! All of them (plus RUDE CHESS and IT’S A BLOCK-PUSHING GAME) can be found in this collection!
Also, I’ll be moving to a new apartment soon! It’s exciting although I worry about the cats a bit, both in terms of logistics and especially Fondue getting used to the new place. We’ll see.
Ludum Dare 55 will be at the end of the week, and Nordic Game Jam a week after that. We’ll see what happens with those…
nother month, another… month. Things have progressed mostly in quite a similar manner as before, but there have been some changes as well. A major thing is that I managed to finally restart my weekly streams, after failing to do so for the entirety of January due to Cat Reasons (and various others). At the moment Planet Keke has the main Tuesday development slot, while ESA2 stays as the Thursday game.
In other streaming news, MelonyPepon‘s crew of mostly-vtuber streamers kindly invited me to play games on stream with them on the weekends, and for the past three or so weeks we’ve had a good time playing Among Us, Jackbox & Gartic Phone. I haven’t really done this kind of social streaming before so it’s been a fun change of pace.
The covemountlike series has also continued, and I’ve now released 9 of these in total this year. The ones released after the previous monthly update are:
In non-computer news, the cats have been getting along really nicely. Fondue still needs a bunch of time to be comfortable around guests, but Vilma’s and Fondue’s playing now ends in hisses much more rarely and there was even a recent instance of Vilma climbing onto the sofa and the cats sleeping there together!
The year has started with a lot going on. Games-wise, the important thing is that I’ve released 6 little browser-based block-pushing puzzle games. It all started with being inspired by a discussion about movement counters in puzzle games in the Thinky Puzzles Discord server, and at this point I’ve actually managed to get out a couple longer-time puzzle ideas that have occupied my brain but not felt inspiring enough to implement. I’ve some more ideas for tiny browser puzzlers, so look forward to that, I guess. Here’re the current ones, in order of release:
In other news, I adopted a second cat, Fondue! A lot of January was spent on getting her more used to the house, me, and Vilma, and while there’s still ways to go especially when it comes to playing with Vilma, she’s progressed amazingly!
Due to me being ill, having some worries, and taking care of Fondue-Vilma relations, I failed to start my weekly streaming. I’m currently trying to get that sorted out but my daily schedule has been even more chaotic than usual due to the cats so it’s a work-in-progress.
I decided on a mostly-whim to export this tiny 2008 escape room game to HTML5, since it seemed fairly trivial and since despite the game’s simplicity I have some fondness for it. Anyway, I did end up having to do some additional work to get the thing rendering at double resolution, but whatever. The game’s likely to take less than 10 minutes to finish.
In other news, all but one of the Limited Alike puzzles in my WPC post below were outdated, broken versions; I’ve now updated them all, as well as added a Celltinels puzzle I had missed into the post.
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)