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.
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.
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:
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…
Don’t mind the silly name: it’s what I ended up with with the boardgame I posted about earlier. I got to playtest the game a bit and it seemed solid enough as it was, so I decided to call it done and put it on Itch.io. I also submitted it to Ludum Dare #53, which feels a bit silly in hindsight.
Once in Space! That’s the game that originally prompted me to set up the hempuli.com website! I remember Nifflas helpfully making me a simple HTML example for how I could format the page for the game, and I’ve been using that as a template ever since (with some adjustments over the years). That was a hugely helpful HTML file!
Anyway, Once in Space was one of my original “platformers-with-a-twist”, alongside games like Timerocketxby, Flickerstrings & GENERIC Platformer. I was quite fond of it, although the initial 2007 version received some harsh-but-valid criticism from a JayIsGames.com reviewer due to how rough the game was to play.
Eventually, in 2011 (I thought it was earlier), I decided to remake the game. For various reasons that version was ultimately kind of lost in time and space, despite being much much more refined game design -wise than the 2007 original. I’ve been thinking of updating it for a new release for years, but now that has actually happened!
In other news, I put Cavern of Flight, one of my highest-quality Ludum Dare entries on Itch.io earlier this year; the game had had a very unfortunate visual bug ever since release where respawning after dying would commonly require you to hard-restart the program. I fixed that for the Itch.io release, but there were a couple additional issues with its design that I didn’t bother fixing at the time. However, while I was still excited about putting OiS 2022 out, I went and actully fixed those issues, making the game a much less rough experience to finish. So that’s two old games now available, better than ever!
Hey! Another new game only a week after the last! Now to be fair, this one I made originally a year ago for Ludum Dare 48. However, I’ve since added polish, undo, new levels, music and so on, so this new release is quite a bit neater than the original. Unfortunately only Windows is supported, though.
Trying to learn to use this new block system of WordPress’…
So! LD #43 ended last weekend, and the results are in. My game, Ludum Dare Simulator, fared fairly well, all things considered! There were 765 Compo entries in total, and my entry managed top100 in 4 categories:
- 15th in Humor
- 23rd in Innovation
- 58th in Overall
- 88th in Fun
I guess I really banked on that humour value. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the results! It’d be fun to make another overly ambitious LD game one day a lá Apocalypse Adventure and Badland Quest, but we’ll see when that happens; it’s not like I don’t have well enough stuff in the works already.
Huh, WordPress looks very different now. I kinda miss the old system. Anyway! After a month+ of no game development streams, I managed to implement some Baba rule changes on-stream today. Progress was very smooth, although at the very end I realized a rather unfortunate implication of the system I was implementing that I’ll have to mull over. Still, very nice! I also played a couple Ludum Dare entries to close the stream off.
The end of the year is closing in on us, and that means I’ll have to get Baba to its finalized state sometime soon! Especially the audio is something I’ve been overlooking for too long now – gotta have to concentrate my efforts on that.
Ludum Dare #43 was last weekend! I have some exams coming but really wanted to participate; the theme didn’t initially give any inspiration and I was ready to call it a studying weekend, but then an idea struck and I ended up creating something.
My entry is Ludum Dare Simulator, a game where the sacrifices come in form of allocating time and resources to finish a game under the 48-hour time limit. This is done by placing blocks on a grid where every cell represents a single hour of Ludum Dare. The game is heavily inspired by the boardgame Patchwork that was recently shown to me.
The game itself is fairly simple (although the underlying scoring rules are way complicated, oh well), but for me the most interesting bits come after the player submits their game and goes to the scoring phase. I wanted to add some funny stuff to liven up the experience, so there are some surprised to be seen after finishing. It felt really good to finish an LD entry, considering at least two of my previous entries (Sublunar Vessel and Super Metabolism Bros) were left in a somewhat unfinished state. I even had time to compose music!