Posts with tag 'Planet Keke':
2024 in review
Posted on 2024-12-31 01:44
Here we are again, at the end of the year. I'm looking at the 2023-in-review post as I'm writing this, and right from the get-go I can notice a clear difference in one aspect: 2024 was my most productive year ever, if we calculate that purely by the number of videogames released. Saying this feels somewhat disingenuous due to the fact that most of the Covemountlikes that make up the high release rate were extremely tiny, spur-of-the-moment things, with multiple taking less than a full day to get done. On the other hand, several of the games that account for the previous record unusually-active year, 2009, were also made in just a couple weeks, so in that sense it wouldn't be fair to consider this year "cheating" in some way. I guess with a metric like this the biggest problem is that larger releases that take their time will get unfairly little attention since they fill just a single increment on the bar chart, just like everything else. Oh well.
Alongside the onslaught of Covemountlikes this year saw a couple other releases. Out of those the most notable videogame release was A Solitaire Mystery, although I still intend to get back to it to add some more solitaires and to polish things up further so I'm not quite done with the project. At this point it might make sense to note that ASM was chosen to be showcased at the Experimental Games Showcase at GDC 2025! I won't be participating in person due to the travelling required etc, but it's cool to be accepted in any case. :)
Other than videogames, I made a couple boardgames and paper puzzles. The latter was very much sidelined for this year, although I did occasionally spend time trying to come up with new genres, to no avail. In the boardgame department, Royal Jelly actually garnered some additional interest, as evidenced by 2 people making their own sets (first, second)! This is also the first year I ever entered a boardgame design contest, although my game, Stroll & Hike, didn't fare too well. In fact I made another boardgame for a different contest near the start of the year, but a period of anxiety caused me to miss the deadline and I haven't polished the game up for release yet.
In terms of things not related to releasing creative works, a big change for me this year was that I joined a small group of streamers and we've organized a whole bunch of collaborative streams throughout the year. Thanks to everyone in the possibly-unnamed crew for their kindness!
Another big change was the introduction of Fondue the cat to my life. Apart from me having problems with treating her asthma with an inhaler, I'd like to say that her time here has been positive and she's gained a lot of courage and received a lot of care. Although 2 weeks ago she did swallow a salted peanut and ended up needing surgery for it, the poor cat. She has recovered very well and next Thursday she'll get the wound-licking-prevention jumpsuit off, which I'm sure she'll be very happy about. Vilma has also been doing mostly great, except that her knowledge of being able to demand attention has given me some frustration over the year, haha.
Fondue's not the only one who required medical attention near the end of the year - a couple days ago I fell over after stumbling on some cobblestones and fractured my right thumb. After the cast was put in place the finger hasn't hurt that much, and surprisingly enough I was able to put the final covemountlike together in spite of it. Still, that's 6 weeks of recovery ahead of me, and I actually have to go back to the hospital for additional X-rays because apparently the finger might not be entirely right still. Moral of the story: falling over can be nasty!
A thing that is big for me but probably not anyone else is that I moved my website into a completely new era of design, creating a more dynamic listing for my games, moving my blog away from Wordpress and bringing my art from DeviantArt to my own webspace. It was nice to set this stuff up, and I hope some people other than just me find utility in the website. (Although Hostmonster just announced merging with Bluehost and advertising their AI tools, so we'll see if I'll suddenly need to migrate the whole thing elsewhere, urgh...)
Might that be about it? Next year I think I'll try to concentrate more on slightly larger projects now that this year was themed heavily after making a ton of extremely tiny things. It'd be nice to finally manage to paint again, too, but we'll see about that. ESA2 and Planet Keke will stay on the docket, at least. Happy new year!
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Tags: Games, ESA 2, Planet Keke, Covemountlikes, Small games, Browser games, Other, Regular updates, Pets, Article, Boardgames
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
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
Monthly update: May 2024 Tags: Games, Planet Keke, ESA 2, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming, Small games, Pets, Other, Browser games 2023 in review Tags: Games, Baba Is You, ESA 2, Planet Keke, Small games, Boardgames, Paper puzzles, Noita, Other, Regular updates, Pets, Article Monthly update: December 2023 Tags: Games, Small games, Planet Keke, Boardgames, Baba Is You, Regular updates Monthly update: August 2023 Tags: Games, ESA 2, Small games, Planet Keke, Boardgames, Other, Regular updates What happened in July Tags: Art, Boardgames, Games, Other, Planet Keke, Regular updates, Small games Comic, games + more Tags: Games, ESA 2, Planet Keke, Masjin, Old games, Paper puzzles, Other, Plans, Small games
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.
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??]
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Posted on 2023-12-23 07:01
Hey look! I didn’t miss the timing!
Anyway, big news first: Mobile Suit Baba is out! Really glad it didn’t take a year, but it got close. I want to add a bit more in terms of modding support and such, but after that it’ll be time to return to Planet Keke.
You can find the game here!
I also finished Flatdog Scuffle, another 2-player abstract boardgame! The rulebook will need some clarifications and illustrations, but the game seems to work pretty nicely.
See the rules here!
Posted on 2023-09-12 12:39
I really need to do these at the end of the month instead of during the next month, I have a lot of stuff from September I’d want to write about!!
Anyway – last month was mostly fairly uneventful. My game projects progressed, the solitaire collection got another new solitaire (not released yet), Planet Keke got its name and moved along at a slow-but-steady pace, same for Mobile Suit Baba & ESA2.
I’ve had a bunch of trouble lately concentrating on my game projects when not streaming. With this in mind the weekly streams have been excellent, but it has meant that I’ve only done work on my projects a couple hours every week, and that doesn’t quite cut it due to how slow everything progresses at the moment. I’ll need to figure out something there…
My favourite procrastination from videogame dev has become… boardgame dev! I designed about 3-ish new boardgames last month, one of which can be seen above. The design processes might spill a bit over to September, hard to remember. Anyway, I have 3 boardgames that I think are almost ready, but that need a final(?) looking-at, as well as writing out the final rules, before I’m happy putting them available. I removed Malsymmetric from my Itch.io listing because after some thought that one didn’t really feel solid enough. Maybe I should take another look at it…
What else… right, I set up the Mailchimp newsletter thing, and sent the first newsletter at the end of last month! That was exciting! I doubt I’ll have enough content for regular monthly messages, but maybe that’s a positive for most of the people receiving them; makes sense to only send out stuff when there’s something to actually say.
And finally: I graduated! For real this time! I’m now a Master of Psychology, and I also applied for and received official sanctioning so now I’m also a real, proper Psychologist. Nice! I’m planning to join some student events this autumn to get a final taste of university life as a way of saying farewell to that part of my life. I’ll also be drawing a final(?) comic & cover art piece to our student magazine.
I guess that’s it, mostly? As said, it’s hard to remember anymore exactly what took place in August and what’s already September material. Not that any of this really matters, haha.
Posted on 2023-08-02 19:02
I guess I could try doing a monthly update, since weekly updates were clearly too difficult for me and several of the past blogposts have been kind of general “what’s been going on” style affairs.
1: Kepi
I released another boardgame! The main motivator for making it was that I had these wooden sticks that felt difficult to use because they were cylindrical and as such rolled really easily. I bought a cheap “Yankee scarf” for 1,5€ in the local dollar store equivalent to help with the rolling, and in the end was very satisfied with the overall look. The game turned out to have some stalemating issues, but a rule addition suggested by pinchazumos seems to have fixed that. Thanks! You can download the rules for free here.
2: First Planet Keke song
I almost-finished the first tune for this game, and decided to make a proper preview video to showcase it! There are little details that I still want to adjust in the song, but overall I’m happy with it. The game has also been coming along pretty nicely, although there’s plenty left to do.
3: Watercolours
I had a small notebook and decided to do some little paintings in it. It was fun to paint again, and the small size ensured that being more haphazard about it didn’t feel bad.
4: Summer cottage
I spent a couple days at our summer cottage. It was neat! Photo not mine.
5: New Baba tactics game work
I hadn’t worked on this for a while, so it was nice to get some new work done on it.
Posted on 2023-07-08 00:42
First of all, I made another little comic!
Second of all, I went and updated the website so that there are no more imgur links in the game screenshots; I noticed that some of those links had died and it made sense to go for entirely local images. I should eventually also add local download links for those games that only offer an Itch.io link, I think. We’ll see. I also shuffled the games around a bit because I felt that some notably tiny games were in the “medium games” category and vice versa. Also some games graduated to the “big games” category! I should really rethink the category system altogether…
Third of all, the paper puzzle collection has been updated with the latest puzzle types like Equal measures and Diagaquarium.
Fourth of all – I made Masjin available again! The server’s still dead, but at least you can download the game (and the server hosting tool is likewise available again).
Fifth and final of all, have some screenshots of the games I’m working on:
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