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!
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.
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!
I added A Solitaire Mystery, boardgames and Mobile Suit Baba to the games lists. I also added a separate page for listing the various social media sites I’m currently active on.
I also added LITSilly to the paper puzzle collection.
I decided to finally set up a mailchimp account in order to be able to let interested people subscribe for some kind of news about my games. This seemed prudent since I bet there’s a bunch of people who didn’t want to move from Twitter to Cohost/Mastodon and thus haven’t been seeing any news stuff related to my projects. You can find the subscription page here.
I’ve added the three recent new games (Babataire, Cavern Sweeper & Mamono Mower) to the main website. Due to them being very quickly-made and in-browser-only, I initially added them to the “small games” page, but after some consideration moved them to the “medium games” page, because my “medium games” page is more a “games not made for game jams or other such events” page.
Twitter’s future looks even more uncertain now, so I guess I might be posting about future endeavours in here & in my Mastodon & Cohost accounts more than before soon. Oh well!
Hmm. There was a time when I actively didn’t understand the purpose of Twitter, but as I’ve gotten more into “professional” game development, its utility in sharing my work (and shitposting) has become more apparent to me, and despite the various issues with the site, for the past couple years I’ve mostly appreciated its existence. Especially maintaining the Baba Is You official Twitter account has been quite rewarding apart from some specific bad experiences.
Anyway, as it is, Twitter’s future looks somewhat uncertain, so like a lot of other people it seemed prudent to set up some alternative social media accounts for possible future use. At the moment my plan is to still use Twitter and just mirror relevant posts to these other sites, but we’ll see if that’ll change in the future. And who knows, maybe this means that I’ll post more here on my blog in the future?? Life can be odd like that.
Ok! The online level-sharing is out in public beta!
As mentioned earlier, I wanted to test a method to let people outside of Steam to also be able to check out the open beta. And now there’s a way to do exactly that! Just head to itch.io and pick up the limited-time editor build; it will only be kept up-to-date until the editor releases and has some limited utilities, but it’ll let you experience the full extent of the level-sharing beta! I understand that is still not quite comparable to being able to test the editor on a Switch, but as I said earlier, that is not entirely something I could make happen. I hope people will find this method acceptable. Thanks for your support!
One more thing: I set up a Twitter account for gathering level codes of levels that people found cool or interesting. Do tweet at @BabaLevels if you feel you’ve found such a level! This’ll make picking the featured levels easier in the future as well.
So, since I haven’t had much to discuss here for the past few months but have been streaming game development regularly, I finally added a proper stream button to the top of the blog. You can see there if I’m streaming, but do also follow me on Twitter if you want more detailed schedule information. Sorry about the silence!
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