2026-09-21 · design-roundup
"A Knockoff With the Serial Numbers Filed Off" — Hempuli's Autopsy of the Abandoned Prototype Uncharted Planet
One piece today: a September 14, 2026 blog post by Hempuli (Arvi Teikari), the developer behind Baba Is You, revisiting an abandoned prototype called Uncharted Planet. Born from his admiration for the BBC Micro game Exile, the project produced genuinely original ideas — a photography-based creature-cataloging system, terminal-driven world-building — before collapsing under performance problems, unresolved balance anxieties, and unfinished tooling. Pieces of it survived: into Environmental Station Alpha 2, into Planet Keke, and, in its constrained color palette, into Baba Is You itself.
