Posts from year 2018:
Weekly-8 progress posts #116 & #117: Polish, polish, polish Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Plans, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-9 progress post #115: Audio, part 2 Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates, Other Weekly-10 progress post #114: Audio Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-10 progress posts #112 & 113: BABABAB Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly-12 progress post #111: Rules Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Streaming, Regular updates, Ludum Dare, Plans Ludum Dare #43: Sacrifices must be made Tags: Games, Ludum Dare, Procedural generation, Streaming, Small games Baba keeps trucking on Tags: Games, Baba Is You Woo Tags: Art, Other, Procedural generation Mandelbrot sets Tags: Art, Other, Procedural generation Baba News + Weekly-7 progress post #110: Eh Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Happenings, Other, Plans, Streaming, Regular updates
Posted on 2018-12-30 06:39
Streaming continues to be more of a thing! Great! I streamed yesterday and today, and both streams were quite similar in that most work was done on fixing small issues, implementing audio, and picking at the remaining ending sequence effects. The “must-have” to-do list is getting pretty short, but there are a handful of scary-looking things left that potentially require a good amount of work (or just overcoming the fear of implementing them.)
SFX has been ignored for a while now, so getting some of that done today felt great. The various “fanfares” for achieving things is especially scary, but at least there’re only a handful of those to make.
Music-wise I’m missing at least 2-4 songs: I want to have a remix of the theme song to play in the credits, + there are three areas that don’t have their own themes. However, at least one of those areas could technically do without a unique theme, so I’ll have to try to prioritize the less-optional songs/features first and see if I have time and/or energy for the remaining songs.
Everything related to the ending of the game feels scary to make for a variety of reasons, but as long as my ambitions regarding it stay relatively small, there shouldn’t be all that much left to implement.
It’s been a pretty wild year – maybe I should do a separate end-of-the-year post?
Posted on 2018-12-23 08:37
Yay, two streams in a row! Today’s stream was very similar to yesterday’s in that I concentrated on fixing issues and polishing things, along with implementing audio-related features. I implemented a system that makes repeated actions have smaller visual/audio effects; this makes the soundscape less oppressive and improves performance in cases where a lot of stuff happens across several turns. Yesterday’s stream showed that overlapping audio is a surprisingly large source of lag, so it’s great that this new system helps with that issue as well.
Happy holidays! There’ll probably be more streams once we return from our Christmas holiday trip; we’ll see.
Posted on 2018-12-22 06:04
Yay, more streams! I got a bunch of bugs fixed, along with implementing a new system for creating particle effects. However, there were a couple complications. I intended to “figure out” a new theme (or two) for the game’s OST, but while I got some nice tunes made, I got kind of stuck with my ideas and the results weren’t very usable. I might be able to tease out something nicer from them, though. Another thing was that the aforementioned new particle system didn’t turn out to be quite as useful as I’d hoped. My hypothesis was that the particle system was a bottleneck behind the slowness of certain in-game interactions; it turned out that the sound that plays during those interactions has a larger effect on performance. So again, my efforts weren’t fruitful, but I got some potentially-useful new information to apply for later optimizations. The chat was very active and I’m very happy about that :)
Happy holidays, everyone!
Posted on 2018-12-17 06:00
I forgot to write an update last time I streamed!! Anyway, I’ve managed to keep a more active streaming schedule (at the expense of sleep, unfortunately) and progress during streams has been pretty good! I’ve pretty much finished not one but two new songs and that’s great; SFX will need more looking at. Today’s stream was spent largely on little graphical & audio tweaks along with trying to polish the ending. Can’t wait to have that last item off the to-do list.
Posted on 2018-12-12 03:56
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.
Posted on 2018-12-04 05:03
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!
Ludum Dare page
Download the game
Posted on 2018-11-24 14:23
Contrast with an early version:
Posted on 2018-11-01 01:57
Posted on 2018-10-31 04:48
I started experimenting with visualizing fractals. At first I tried to do it on my own, by looking at the (actually not super complicated but still a bit beyond my understand) Wiki article about the Mandelbrot set:
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Then WikiHow of all things came to my aid and I slowly figured it out:
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All of these are about 2x the actual rendering speed, apart from the final one which somehow runs at 4x speed despite telling it otherwise!! Anyway, this was a really fun diversion. Not useful, though, I think.
Posted on 2018-10-30 03:59
Hmm; I seem to have managed to keep something like a once-every-two-weeks streaming schedule. That’s good, I guess? Today’s stream wasn’t very productive; I mostly polished things in Baba and drew a couple new sprites, but wasn’t really in a good state of mind for spriting so the results aren’t mega convincing. I also started at a level for a good while without getting good ideas for what to do with it, and so on. But that happens! I just need to have a bit better of an idea of what to do if things aren’t going my way during a stream in the future.
I’ve mentioned this on Twitter already, but I should’ve said it here already: Baba Is You’s release is delayed until 2019! I think I might’ve been able to finish the game this year, but I wouldn’t have had time to properly handle all the ~Business Stuff~ related to releasing a game, so delaying felt like the sensible option.
Also, Baba will release on Nintendo Switch! I might’ve said this before, but yup, that’s a thing! It’ll release simultaneously on Steam and Switch, and matpow2 is doing the porting.
Also also, I was at IndieCade Europe, held in Paris, a week ago, and Baba Is You won the audience award there! The award statue is really cool-looking, I should take pics. Whee!