Posts with tag 'Nordic Game Jam':
Neltris & stuff Tags: Games, Nordic Game Jam, Ludum Dare, Small games, Browser games, Happenings, Plans, Streaming Monthly update: Marchpril 2024 Tags: Games, Pets, Happenings, Small games, Nordic Game Jam, Ludum Dare, Other, Plans, Regular updates, Covemountlikes, Browser games RUDE CHESS Tags: Games, Small games, Covemountlikes, Happenings, Nordic Game Jam News! And stuff! Part 2 Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Happenings, Nordic Game Jam, Procedural Generation, Small games Baba Is You’s trailer!! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Nordic Game Jam, Other, Plans, Happenings Nordic Game Jam 2017! Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Nordic Game Jam, Happenings, Plans, ESA 2, Cloud Realm, No More Sweden, Other, Art, Small games Weekly progress post #61: An end to farting Tags: Games, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates, Nordic Game Jam, Happenings, Plans Weekly progress post #60: Shadowbeasts! Tags: Games, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates, Nordic Game Jam, Happenings, Plans An open apology to the Ludum Dare community (and other game jam communities) Tags: Other, Happenings, Other Jams, Nordic Game Jam, No More Sweden, Ludum Dare Weekly progress post #9: Post-NGJ pondering Tags: Games, ESA 2, Nordic Game Jam, Happenings, Small games, Regular updates, Streaming, Plans
Posted on 2024-04-21 15:49
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.
You can play it here!
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.
Posted on 2024-04-09 04:11
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…
Posted on 2022-05-04 03:12
Heyy, after a long while I’ve actually finished a small game! My dreams of releasing a small game every month this year have shattered already but at least there’s this (and should be some more before the year ends).
I was at Nordic Game Jam last weekend; it was great to be at an event like this for the first time in 3 years, and due to recent mistakes with game jams (don’t try making menu-heavy games at game jams) I was kind of hankering to make something small. I had this funky puzzle idea in my head, and thought it vaguely fit the themes I drew (“Schadenfreude” and “Matching”), so decided to go with this concept instead of thinking up something new. It’s nice to get some of these ideas out without too much effort.
I’ve now polished the game a bit; it offers 14 levels of somewhat mysterious puzzling fun.
Look at the game here!
Posted on 2018-07-23 00:29
So then, there’s a bunch of other stuff that’s happened gamedev-wise, so let’s list some images!
– Baba’s “programming” system is complicated enough that it allows for making games inside Baba! They lack certain vital stuff but here’re Space Invader, Snake & a platformer! The Space Invader thing was done a longer time ago so it might not work quite as nicely right now with the layout it has there, but the idea should be reproducible. Baba also has a Twitter account now, @babaisyou_!
https://twitter.com/babaisyou_/status/1019692763653312518
– Some more pics of the game. The bottom-most image with the “Empty Is You” showcases one of the more hard-to-grasp elements of the game and it’ll be fun to see if people get them.
– I’ve been toying around with text generation using Markov chain -based techniques. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve generated stuff using movie scripts, cookbook recipes, MtG cards, airline catalogue ads, motivational sentences and book/movie titles. I currently have two engines, one of which is more customized and works better on longer texts, and another that’s less sophisticated but more chaotic and thus a good fit for short texts.
I’ve set up two Twitter accounts for posting generated stuff: @chaingenerator miscellaneous text and @MTGmarkov for MtG cards only. Like so:
https://twitter.com/MtGmarkov/status/983508254528503808
https://twitter.com/chaingenerator/status/1014547954324135936
– I participated in the Nordic Game Jam a couple weeks after GDC! I was still kind of exhausted from GDC and Stumblehill was causing me stress so I didn’t manage to concentrate very well, but I nevertheless managed to make these little prototypes. One is a gam jam simulator showing little jammers walk around the venue with game ideas, fulfilling their basic needs. There’s no gameplay but it’s fun to watch. The other is a cooking game prototype where you can make dishes that get named procedurally. Pretty neat but the idea was too meny-heavy to be fun to implement at a jam. You can find both games on my itch.io page!
Posted on 2017-12-12 17:05
Woop! It’s here! I’ve now decided that Baba Is You will be released in Summer, 2018, and the game also has an official website and Steam page now; go wishlist it, you!!
Website: http://www.hempuli.com/Baba/
Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/736260/Baba_Is_You/
Press kit: http://www.hempuli.com/press/sheet.php?p=Baba_Is_You
Posted on 2017-04-28 00:19
(Cool photo & cool cake by my girlfriend, Anni :3)
Nordic Game Jam 2017 was last weekend, and I ended up winning it with my game, Baba Is You!
I went in not really expecting much; I wasn’t initially really in the mood for making new games so the plan was to kinda feel the situation and possibly just work on ESA 2 and/or Snake Game. The theme of the jam was “Not There”, and at some point it got me thinking about “not” as an operator in programming/logic. This in turn made me think of a puzzle game where the game logic is part of the game world, and eventually this idea turned into my entry. I was expecting to run to some really hairy coding problems and not be able to finish, but hey, that very much didn’t happen!
I’m not totally sure where to take the game from here; during the event my plan was to polish it a bit and release it mostly as-is, but since people really liked it and it even raised some philosophical considerations in some players, I think I’ll be working on it further.
Download the game on itch.io!
In other news, Environmental Station Alpha’s second anniversary was also last weekend, and I almost completely forgot to announce the sale that went with that. Oh well! Let’s hope we won’t get to its 3rd anniversary before ESA 2 is done.
Next up in the indie gamedev event schedule will be No More Sweden in June; we’ll see what happens there :O
Posted on 2017-04-20 02:03
Nordic Game Jam starts tomorrow! I really want to be able to show bits of ESA 2 and Snake Game there, so I spent today’s stream polishing some tiny bits of both. Thursday will be mostly quiet so I hope that I’ll be able to pull off some more polish in preparation for the actual event.
In ESA 2 I finally updated the double jump effect as well as the hookshot’s graphical look. Not 100% sure about the latter because of how “lasery” it looks, it almost feels as if this new hookshot should be able to be used offensively. Nevertheless, it’s an improvement. I’ll try to add some polish to certain early-game areas as well so that I could show off the beginning of the game without feeling that it’s way too work-in-progress.
In Snake Game I worked a bit on a cutscene/hub area that’ll be used for accessing the various encounters in the game. I needed to implement a ladder for said area, and to be honest the code for it is fairly hacky, but hopefully that won’t become a problem later on. I’ll try to get this area polished further before NGJ so that the player can somewhat seamlessly move from the main menu to the first encounter while learning controls on the way.
Posted on 2017-04-15 02:07
Today’s stream saw the addition of 1 new small room, beginnings of the tileset for the ~FINAL NON-OPTIONAL AREA~ and a new enemy for the previous area, seen above. The penultimate area is starting to feel pretty good apart from certain awkward room transitions, a missing bossfight and the general lack of background details that applies for almost the whole game at the moment. I’m going to have to spend a bunch of time decorating everything, eventually…
I’ll also have to redo the in-game map soon! I think I’ve talked about this before, but it’s nevertheless something I’ve been hesitating with because the current system has some really obscure code going on and picking that apart will probably be less than enjoyable.
Nordic Game Jam will be next week! I’m probably going and based on previous years it should be good fun. Not sure if I’ll get anything worthwhile done, though…
Posted on 2016-09-15 02:00
Just a moment ago I finally realized something I should’ve realized years and years ago, and decided that the best way to approach it would be to write an open apology.
Over the years of participating in Ludum Dares and other game jams, I have partly unthinkingly and partly knowingly cheated and otherwise acted maliciously in ways that have made my results look better than they deserve. This has happened in two ways:
- Using certain bits of MMF2 code I had made earlier to get started with a game project faster, and
- Using the “submission hour” to add content and polish/tweaks
In earlier LDs I’ve taken part in it’s also possible that I’ve added content after the deadline along with bugfixes, but I’m not certain of the extent of this kind of behaviour and I’m fairly certain it hasn’t happened in recent years (not that that makes it acceptable to have happened before!)
The former category of cheating has mostly concerned certain relatively simple “modules” that I’ve added to my projects upon starting to work on them; it would’ve been quite trivial to re-implement the same features during the actual compo and I doubt I’ve gained much advantage via this abuse of the rules; this of course doesn’t make my behaviour any less wrong, merely a bit dumber.
Using the “submission hour” for polish and features has definitely affected the quality of my entries significantly; I have no excuse for this behaviour.
It makes me angry at myself to have abused the goodwill of the community in such a way and I’m very very sorry that I’ve acted this way. The reason behind this kind of behaviour is probably partially in my own naïvete; when I first participated in LD I was much younger and thus had less of a moral compass, and after that it’s been easier to point at past offences and think “well, I did that before so I don’t have to care now, either”, or just not think about the whole issue in the first place. I’m glad I’ve realized that this way of thinking is actively malicious and morally wrong, but I’m really sad it took me this long to actually decide to acknowledge it and the awful things I’ve done. What makes me feel even more awful is the fact that I’ve manipulated my time lapse videos so that this behaviour couldn’t be seen in them.
So, again, I’m very deeply sorry to have acted in such a malicious manner, and I apologize for having been as dumb and mean as I have. Ludum Dare has been a very important part of my game developer hobby for these past 7 years and I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed all the experiences related to the event; I just wish this kind of attitude hadn’t been a part of it behind the scenes, or at least that I’d have been morally sound enough to stop doing it, feel genuinely sorry and apologize a long time ago.
As a gesture that someone hopefully finds useful, I’ve decided to upload the bits of engine I’ve re-used in many of my LD games; right now I can recall two that I’ve utilized in multiple entries (especially the latter can be found in nearly every entry):
- A simple platforming engine. The version I’ll include here contains some extra functionality, such as slopes, because I’m not completely certain on whether I’ve used only the simplest form in a cheaty manner or also this more advanced one.
- A system for quickly resizing the game window to a multiplier of its original size. This is a very simple piece of code, but as a result also very easy to quickly add to a project at the start of development.
Additionally I’ve used Adam “Sketchy” Hawker’s pathfinding tutorial in multiple entries, and while I’m not certain of how much of the tutorial code I’ve copied directly to my entries, I have a memory that suggests that I’ve done so and renamed variables afterwards to make this less apparent. This is awful.
I have used these two particular engine pieces in a similarly cheaty way in other game jams, such as No More Sweden and Nordic Game Jam, for similarly dumb and irresponsible reasons, although without the intention to act maliciously (if that matters).
I hope that the fact that I bring this matter up on my own helps prove that I genuinely feel very sorry about it and wish to be a better person in the future. It’ll be somewhat scary to see what’ll come out of this, but in the end whatever possible bad outcomes are deserved and I’m nevertheless sure that this is the right thing to do, right now.
Here are the two pieces of engine mentioned:
Platforming engine (with slopes) – ThePodunkian kindly taught me the basics of this design years ago (in 2008, maybe?)
Screen size multiplier – I’m fairly sure I implemented this myself and refined it over the years.
Seems like Adam’s pathfinding tutorials are no longer available; I feel slightly uncomfortable uploading them as they are, but if anyone wants I can make a tutorial based on the system I’ve used.
I’ll be posting this on twitter & the Ludum Dare blog; hopefully all relevant parties will see it.
Posted on 2016-04-14 03:46
So yeah, Nordic Game Jam was last weekend and because of it I forgot to add a weekly update last week! I was initially slightly afraid that I’d be too busy with things to really enjoy the event, but in the end everything turned out great! It was a lot of fun to hang out with those indie dev friends that I only meet at these kinds of events, and the atmosphere was very relaxed. I even got to have a sauna twice!
The theme of the jam was “Leak”. I almost completely disregarded the theme, and made a tiny game called Sausagebear and Mr. Duck. I had a very strong inspiration of a game with ducks that can be herded and followed that; in the end I didn’t have time to polish things quite as much as I’d have liked, but that’s understandable seeing that I started working on this some 12 hours before the deadline.
GET THE GAME HERE!
My favourite games this year were
1. Jukio’s Stress-reliever.exe. We had a lot of fun during the jam and this was one of the results. Jukio does great stuff. LINK HERE!
2. Doki Doki Densha Sekai. A very dreamlike experience, resembles Yume Nikki although with more meditation and less creepy. At first I wasn’t impressed but the metro mechanic made this really really inspiring! LINK HERE!
Tonight I worked a bit on the new area in ESA 2, as well as implemented some tiny fixes to Snake Game. With the latter I ran pretty quickly to some aesthetical issues that will need to be solved so I didn’t work on it on-stream that much. I’m starting to appreciate the artstyle of ESA 2 more, and these new enemies (+ one not visible in the gif) have a very nice sense of weight to them.
I kind of want to stream again on the weekend, we’ll see if that happens, though.