I'm announcing Ducky's Delivery Service next Thursday. Here's a private link to its itch store page and some new music!
While putting together the Steam and itch store pages, I noticed that itch has an optional 'secret link' that lets people see the game's store page before it's officially up. So if you want to see the Ducky's Delivery Service store page a week before it's officially announced, here it is!
There's no trailer yet and the text isn't necessarily 100% final, but it's pretty close. Speaking of the lack of a trailer, I should talk about why it's not there yet:
I'm still working on music for the trailer
Last week, the game's only piece of music was a laid-back jazzy track for the cave area:
I like it, but I don't think it's upbeat or exciting enough to work in the game's trailer. My plan was to take things in a bit more of a 1990s jazz fusion direction with big saxophones and synths. Think Sonic CD, Daytona USA and so on. I spent most of the last week struggling to get this working to no avail, as I couldn't find any good usable instrument sounds and I just couldn't get the hang of the music production side of things at all. So although I would love to learn more about producing that kind of music in the future, I just don't have enough experience to pull it off for this game. It took me far too long to figure this out, and I got way more stressed out over my music struggles than I needed to, but at least I'm mostly over it now.
So because big loud saxophones were no longer an option, I had to think about what to do instead. I even dug around through some of the really old music that I composed as a teenager, and found one piece that I really liked and could probably do something with. But unfortunately...it was music that I specifically wrote to one day be used in a cave area of a videogame. The one thing that I already had. But if you're curious, here's a clip of some unused videogame cave music I wrote in 2005:
It was my best attempt at ripping off Geothermal from the Cave Story soundtrack, written using Studio Pixel's PxTone Collage software. As much as I like it, I'm not totally sure that it would really suit this game anyway. But even if I can't find a way to reuse any of this track for this game, I'm sure I'll be able to turn it into something I can use in another game one day!
As there was no more old music for me to reuse, I decided to write more new stuff. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that I'd been missing an obvious answer. I'd spent so long trying to push myself to make something bigger and more complex than Chessplosion's music for this game, but I like Chessplosion's music! So I decided to go back to just an electric piano, an upright bass and a drumkit, along with some occasional synth sounds, and I started making some new music.
Nothing here is 100% complete as I still need to do a bit of work on the mixing. But here's the (work in progress) music for the special delivery story events:
And here's the (work in progress) music for the beach area:
I'm happy with both of these! But sadly I think they're both too chilled out to be used in an action game's announcement trailer. So my job for this week is to keep making more music for my game, with the aim of ending up with at least one track that works well in a trailer. It feels like the volcano area and the starting area should both have some exciting upbeat music, but we'll see how it goes.
If I don't manage to write any trailer-appropriate music by next Thursday, I'll just put the store pages up anyway and release the trailer a bit later. I've already left the game's announcement until way too late in development, so I'd rather just show it to people as soon as I can. Anyway, that's where I'm at. Let me know if you have any comments on the music or the itch store page, and I'll see you next week with the game's public announcement!