Ducky's Delivery Service post-game content!
Ducky's Delivery Service already had lots of optional and post-game content
To reach the ending of Ducky's Delivery Service, you have to earn enough stars to unlock the final stage, then beat that stage. So there are lots of optional things that you don't have to do, such as...
- Getting the maximum amount of stars in each stage
- Playing the optional extra-difficult stage in each world. such as this cave stage that I keep showing off in the trailer (video footage is from last October):
- Trying to beat all of the time trial times for delivering flyers (video footage is from last November). These time trial times are the hardest thing in the game, and I highly recommend giving them a try if you enjoyed things like the Break The Targets challenges in the Super Smash Bros. games!
You also unlock a couple of tiny extras for clearing the final stage, along the same lines of the Speedrun Challenge and Boss Rush extras that you unlock for clearing Chessplosion.
So when I decided to add a secret post-game reward for people who collect all of the stars in the game, it wasn't because I thought the game needed more content. I just wanted to give people a little reward to thank them for playing everything.
It didn't need to be anything huge, but if it was a fun gameplay-based bonus like an extra challenge or extra level, it would hopefully be a fun extra that skilled players could keep coming back to, including myself! My favorite thing to go back and replay in Chessplosion is a short unlockable post-game fight, after all.
What about a really difficult final level?
My first thought was to make a super difficult final level for people to play! I loved the final post-game levels in games like Super Mario 3D World and Celeste, so why not do the same thing here?
So I made a super difficult final level, and it wasn't great. It turned out that between the normal final stage and the optional extra-difficult stages in each world, I'd already used all of my most interesting ideas for difficult challenges.
But there was one big exception. When I was making the final level, I tried making a big long room full of diagonally-moving red ghosts. Flying back and forth through that small room felt way more fun than the entire rest of the level! Here's what it looked like (blurred for spoilers):
What if I just use the one fun part?
I decided to make a fun challenge out of the one fun part of my final level! The whole point of adding a post-game reward in the first place was just to give players a little thank you for playing through the whole game, after all, so it was fine if it was just a small bonus instead of a big level.
If you want to see what I ended up putting in the game, here it is (blurred for spoilers):
And that's where I left it! I won't talk about it much here for spoiler reasons, but you get the idea of what it is if you watched the video. I hope people have fun playing around with it when they've beaten everything else in the game, and I hope it's something they can keep going back to in the future whenever they feel like playing a few minutes of Ducky's Delivery Service.
Making this little post-game challenge really got me in the mood for making small games. I already wanted to try making something small after Ducky's Delivery Service, but now I'm really looking forward to it. I'll try my hardest to finish Ducky's Delivery Service before the urge to make a small arcadey score attack game becomes too strong!
Anyway, that's all I did this week. I don't know if it was a smart decision to spend a whole week working on a little optional challenge that will only be seen by people who 100% clear the game, but I had fun making it and I think those people will have fun playing it too, so it's fine. Let me know what you think, and I'll see you next week!