Hempuli's blog

Posts with tag 'Other':

New stuff in the gallery
Posted on 2024-09-10 03:10

I added a bunch of new art to the gallery. Or well, 'new' - the new additions are largely really old stuff from before I went to university, and mostly there to showcase the development of my art throughout the years.

Relatedly, some of the old art was so crummy in my eyes now that I added a special category for it - there's now the 'Archive' category, and pieces in it won't be shown in the normal gallery view unless you're viewing a specific timeframe, tag, or such. This way I can keep the default gallery listing a bit more curated while still including art that hasn't aged too well but was important to me in some way.

Gallery here

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Tags: Other, Art

Reactions on blog & gallery
Posted on 2024-09-05 20:09

However, I thought of a way I could still add a little fun interactive thing to the website, so here we are: when viewing a post or a gallery image, you get three options of reactions to add. Effectively they're like likes on various social media services, but I tried to make the options a bit funkier to stay true to the general vibe of the website. I hope you like them!

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Tags: Other, Social media, Art

New gallery page!
Posted on 2024-09-05 03:25

I've been meaning to make a nice gallery page for browsing art I've made for a while now. I've used DeviantArt since something like 2006, but I've been feeling somewhat iffy about the place for a while, + it seems like my general approach to things has been converging towards "make things yourself if you're able", haha. Anyway:

Check the gallery out!

There's still a bunch of art missing, particularly really early stuff, but the "major" pieces that I'm most proud of should all be there already.

(I ended up not making a monthly post for August because there really wasn't that much to write about - game projects progressing, some nice life event stuff, that's all.)

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Tags: Art, Other, Plans

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

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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Tags: Games, Boardgames, Baba Is You, Other

Monthly update: May 2024
Posted on 2024-05-31 15:15

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.

Tags: Games, Planet Keke, ESA 2, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming, Small games, Pets, Other, Browser games

New blog up to date!
Posted on 2024-05-14 22:20

I've now moved all the posts on the Wordpress blog to this new system; now I just need to gather the courage to make it public (and I'm going to backup the entire webspace before doing that!)

EDIT: Alright, website backed up and blog set live! It's a shame about the lack of comments, but I've been warned very strongly against trying to roll up my own comment section code, and I can understand why. Anyway, so long Wordpress! One thing I still need to do eventually is to replace Imgur links with ones local to my own webspace because I don't entirely trust Imgur to keep them around (especially the older ones that aren't linked to any Imgur account). I wonder how annoying it'd be to set up an image-uploading system...?

Tags: Other

Monthly update: Marchpril 2024
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…

Tags: Games, Pets, Happenings, Small games, Nordic Game Jam, Ludum Dare, Other, Plans, Regular updates, Covemountlikes, Browser games

Monthly update: February 2024
Posted on 2024-02-27 11:56

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:

- Powermount
- Ueqouow
- Covejank

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!

Tags: Games, Other, Pets, Regular updates, Streaming, Small games, Social streams, Covemountlikes, Browser games

2023 in review
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??]