Ducky's Delivery Service will be at Steam Next Fest and other events!
The little bit of work that I did get done was on the story. I'm about halfway through turning my early draft into the final script, and I finally got around to adding a cutscene viewer that lets me instantly watch any story scene without having to play through the rest of the game. It currently only exists in development versions of the game, but maybe I could add it to the final game to let people rewatch story scenes.
But even though I didn't do much work this week, that doesn't mean that nothing happened...
Steam Next Fest!
In case you're not familiar, Steam Next Fest is an event that happens every February, June and October, where lots of upcoming games have playable demos that you can try out. Ducky's Delivery Service just got approved for the June edition of Steam Next Fest, so its demo will be playable on June 19!
I might even sneakily put the demo up a bit early and let you know about it in a future issue of this newsletter, but I still have a lot of work to do before it's ready. I'll let you know if this happens!
Other events!
Steam Next Fest isn't the only event out there that lets people see upcoming games. There are tons of online-only and in-person events out there: PAX, Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, Summer Games Fest, The Game Awards, Nintendo Direct, Wholesome Direct, SAGE, Tiny Teams, Friendship Games Week, Indie3, INDIE Live Expo, Bitsummit, The Mix, Digital Dragons, Digital Vikings, Digital Tabletop Fest, Day of the Devs, Cat Awareness Steam Sale... the list never ends.
Some of those events are way too big and expensive for me to be able to attend, but most of the smaller online events are completely free to apply and are open to small indie games. So I applied to a few of these events, and I just found out that it was approved for two of them! I can't say which ones they are, but if you watch any videos showcasing upcoming games in the next couple of months, you might see Ducky's Delivery Service in there.
If anyone reading this is an indie developer working on a commercial indie game themselves, I strongly recommend applying to these events! It sucks to spend time marketing when you could be working on your game instead, but it only takes a few minutes to fill in a form and apply. And if you do manage to get in, your game will be shown to tons of people who are already in the mood to find out about new videogames. I don't like spending time on social media so I was already looking for an excuse to not have to post about my game on Twitter anyway, but these kinds of events really do seem to be a far more efficient use of your marketing time, especially if you don't have a giant social media following. If you have any questions about this sort of thing or anything else at all, just reply to this email and I'm happy to talk about it. This applies to non-developers too, of course!
Wow I didn't do much this week
I didn't get a whole lot of work done, but that's okay. I'm going to get back to working on the story now, and I'm looking forward to sharing my progress with you next week. And before I forget, Rusted Moss released yesterday. I bought it after work and played it for 7 hours straight, so you should check it out if you're at all interested in metroidvanias and elastic grappling hooks. See you next week!