Hempuli's blog

Posts with tag 'Games':

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
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.

Tags: Games, Small games, Boardgames, Covemountlikes, Browser games, Regular updates, Other

Gridmount, website update & more
Posted on 2024-11-05 00:11

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.

Play the game on Itch.io

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:

Also take a look at the cats:

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Tags: Games, Browser games, Covemountlikes, Regular updates, Other, Art, Pets

Environmental Station Alpha C++ version is out!
Posted on 2024-10-23 09:41

We've been working on a new version of ESA with MP2 Games in order to fix some issues with the game and such, and said version is now done. There're a bunch more issues to fix there, as there always are, but it's really nice to see some long-standing problems addressed. Included in the update are things such as:

- Steam Deck support
- Linux/Mac support (the old Mac version had been broken for a while)
- Proper gamepad support, including on other platforms
- Some bugfixes
- Steam achievements
- Steam Overlay (I had to disable it for the entire game back in the day due to rendering issues)
- 60 FPS (the game used to run at... 55 FPS. For silly reasons)

As said, there are still some problems that need addressing, and I'll need to gather energy to get to that, but this is nevertheless a really big step forward for ESA. Yay!

ESA on Steam

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Tags: Games, ESA

Monthly update: September 2024
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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Tags: Other, Streaming, Regular updates, Games, Boardgames, Social media, Plans, Planet Keke, ESA 2

Circlemount
Posted on 2024-09-09 18:43

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.

Check it out on Itch.io!

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Tags: Games, Small games, Browser games, Covemountlikes

Bits and bobs from Wordpress archives
Posted on 2024-07-28 18:29

I've been transferring images on the blog from Imgur to my own webspace to avoid a situation where something gets lost forever due to Imgur breaking/deciding to remove it. I looked through the images uploaded to Wordpress over the years, and there were some fun little images I hadn't posted on the blog, which I now put up in their own retroactive blogposts. See here:

April 2010 - An unposted Paradise Fort screenshot
November 2013 - Two images from an old version of Cloud Realm 2
April 2014 - More Cloud Realm 2, plus me at a student party
May 2014 - Early development of a better Cloud Realm 2 engine
June 2014 - Pictures of ESA 1's final boss

Tags: Games, Ludum Dare, Small games, ESA, Cloud Realm, Other

Monthly update: July 2024
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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Tags: Games, ESA 2, Planet Keke, ESA, Boardgames, Regular updates

Monthly update: June 2024
Posted on 2024-07-09 07:50

A month went by, yet again! I had my birthday and visited the summer cottage with some friends and so on, but game-wise not much happened. I had a phase of low motivation for most of the month, so it was difficult to get much of anything done, but luckily this started going away towards the end of the month (or maybe at the start of July? It's hard to remember).

In any case, ESA 2 and Planet Keke have been progressing at their semi-usual pace. As the previous paragraph implies, said pace has increased a bit over the past week or two, which I'm really happy about! It feels like there have been more gifs to share, too, so the progress has also been slightly more visible.

All in all, though, nothing too exciting. Let's try again next month!

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Tags: Regular updates, Games, Planet Keke, ESA 2

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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