Jun 30, 2019

Baba Is You - Hempuli

Version ID: HP

Well, that took a bit. There was a large under-the-hood change that prevented patching until it was completed. Everything should now work again, although I'm slightly scared of the possibility that this not be the case.

A lot of the work being done in the game at the moment is aimed towards being able to start proper work on the official level editor. Apologies for some longer-standing bugs still being in the game. Anyway!

Fixes & tweaks:
- New option in the settings menu! You can now disable screenshake.
- There's a new secret thing in the game!
- The map Center now has a clear counter like other maps, so you can actually fully finish it. This should retroactively activate if you've already cleared the map.
- Changed the way the level selector works. This shouldn't affect the playing experience apart from one level adjustment listed below. If you note new bugs with the level selector, I'm very interested in knowing about them.
- Very end-game stuff: If you'd try to enter two levels at once, the game now opens a menu to pick from.
- Added a visual indicator for movement that "fails" (i.e. ends up not moving the object). So if Baba moves against a Shifting object, you'll now get a small visual indicator that some movement happened.
- Fixed a buggy cutscene when the player states All Is Win And Done
- A large adjustment where all relevant sprites were moved to a "general" sprite folder instead of many of them being specific to the main game
- You can now use "Return to map" in ???

Level adjustments:
- Elusive condition (prevented an unintended & tedious solution, found in Chasm)
- Floodgates (used to have tons of rules, adjusted the level to have the same idea with less fixed rules, found in Chasm)
- A Way Out? (just blocked off a bit of the level that could've worked like a red herring, found on the main map)
- Another Way (same as above, found in Meta)
- ??? (changed the level to account for changes mentioned above (the map selector behaving like an object made an interaction in this level break stuff, now the level accounts for that))

For modders (spoilers!):
- The maximum object number has been increased to 150, with Cursor using object150
- The map selector/cursor is now an object instead of its own thing. This means that it can be Pushed/Pulled and so on. As a result of this, the old "Set Selector" button in the unfinished editor now spawns one of these Cursor objects at the beginning of the level (assuming there isn't a Cursor there already). One Cursor is selected as the "main cursor" and when you beat a level, only the main cursor is positioned onto the beaten level.
- A new intrinsic rule has been added to rules.lua, "Cursor Is Select". Select governs objects that work like map selectors. If you want to use it in your levelpacks, be wary in that it can be wonky in some special cases.
- If you're using letters in a level, you can now add the line "customobjects" to that level's .ld file to define custom words that are considered valid when creating the rules. These words gain the word type 8, which you need to enable for conditionals etc. using the "argtype" quality.

Jun 5, 2019

Heads-up about next patch

Baba Is You - Hempuli

A new patch with mostly bugfixes will go live sometime soon. There's one change that may affect people who've made custom levels that I referred to in the previous patch notes, and I wanted to point it out again here to avoid extra confusion/frustration.

To prepare for the official editor, the next patch moves sprite files that were in the main level pack's folder but that weren't meant to be specific for that level pack into the general sprite folder. That means that levels that assumed that their sprites are in the level pack -specific folder will load erroneous sprites. No crashes or errors, hopefully, they'll just not look like they should.

Hopefully this won't cause too much trouble. There will probably be some upcoming changes that similarly impact things people have already made; I'll try to mention them beforehand.

May 27, 2019

Patch - May 28th

Baba Is You - Hempuli

Version ID: HJ
(You can press left control + J to view the version ID while in the main menu.)

Fixes and tweaks:
- Fixed a small ending-related visual bug if the grid is enabled
- Fixed a rather severe oversight where certain rules were adding events to the undo buffer in the wrong order, causing errors
- Added an additional check for situations where the player would've cleared an area but due to e.g. level repositioning between versions didn't get the flower for it
- Fixed a bug where floating Baba and a weak Wall would have a mystery interaction
- In certain cases where the game would freeze, it displays a special effect instead (this'll be expanded on and it might not appear in the game at the moment)
- Large underlying code reworking related to conditionals, not relevant in the game right now but it's work for the future
- Related to the above, conditionals with parameters behave in an equivalent way whether the condition has a Not or not
- Fixed the word Facing not accepting directional words
- Related to above, made Empty Is <direction> work mostly as intended
- Fixed "Empty Is X" particle effects appearing everywhere even if Empty had a conditional word

Level adjustments:
- Whoops (a very small change; level found in ???)
- Collaborative effort (removed an unintended approach, found in Depths)
- Acrobatics (one of the changes listed above broke the level, found in Meta)
- Tectonic Movements (fixed a small readability issue, found in Mountaintop)
- Seeking Acceptance (made the level more symmetric, purely a visual thing, found in Mountaintop)
- Heavy Cloud (this might actually be a large change, found in Space)
- Keke And The Star (fixed an unintended solution, found in Chasm)
- The Heist (removed red herrings, found in Cavern)
- Gallery (this'll need more work, but made the limits of the level clearer, found in Center)
- Backstage (fixed a fairly tiny alternative solution, found in Cavern)
- Maritime Adventures (removed an unnecessary element, found in Garden)

For modders:
- I will start working on features related to making the game ready for the level editor such as adjusting the data structuring; these changes will almost inevitably break mods. I'll try to list in these patch notes changes that I think might be like this. My apologies in advance.
- More modder-specific patchnotes will be entirely spoilered, so behold:
- "Not On Keke And Baba" now requires the object not to be on both at the same time instead of either one to make the functionality equivalent to "On"; all conditionals with parameters work now the same way.
- The "operatortype" -value has been removed from values.lua; it made the system needlessly more complicated. If you want to change objects to conditionals, use the 'type' value. If you want a conditional with parameters to allow other parameters than objects, edit the level file and add changes "argtype" and "argextra".
- I'll be moving sprites from the Data/Worlds/baba/sprites/ folder to Data/sprites/ because most of the ones in the former aren't really meant to be specific to the main game.

May 23, 2019

Podcast: The games you might have missed in 2019 so far

Pathologic 2 - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (RPS)

You can t play everything. Trust us, we ve tried. You can t even take note of all the games that come out in one week. Our mushy human brains can barely keep track of why we re standing in the dairy aisle. Was it milk we’re low on? Or butter? Yoghurt? Hang on, I’m vegan. What am I doing here?

Anyway, you re bound to have missed a few games this year. Luckily the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, is here to mention a few puzzle games and town builders that might have flown under your radar. Let’s fire some thick opinion-bullets at them. How else are we supposed to bring them down, so you can play?

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