Jazz music and cheat codes
Hello! I’m on vacation this week so today’s newsletter is a bit shorter than usual. However, I still managed to get some work done last week. Namely…
I made some music for the jump pad stage!
My game’s jump pad stage is by far the most chaotic part of the entire game, featuring huge crowds of enemies constantly bouncing off jump pads and flying all over the place. I wanted that stage to be accompanied by some appropriately silly and chaotic music, so I figured this was as good a time as any to whip out the MIDI trumpets and write some hard bop jazz music.
I genuinely had a good time making this track, which is something I've struggled pretty hard to do when making music in the past. I don't really know what caused my mindset to change, other than simply having a bit more experience and being more comfortable with my music-making tools. I'm not complaining though. I can't wait to make more music!
Demo plans
I’m aiming to officially announce the game in September, with a demo available a few weeks later. So that’s what I spent the rest of last week working on. I’ve already gotten a lot of the boring code out of the way, such as removing some assist mode settings that don’t apply to this game and updating the button config screen.
Speaking of button config, I replaced the old Quack button from Ducky’s Delivery Service with a new Squeak button. It should be a fun way to communicate with your friends in online co-op, as long as the thing that you want to communicate to them can be expressed in the form of squeaking.
I've been paying off my engine code's technical debt too, by writing some long-overdue utility code such as sorting functions and swap functions. Although this isn’t immediately helpful, I’m sure future me will thank me for it.
Ducky’s Delivery Service cheat code revealed!
Ducky's Delivery Service is featured in the new free Indie Game Cheats zine, along with Hazelnut Hex and a pet shop after dark. So if you want to know a cheat that unlocks a Ducky's Delivery Service easter egg, go read the zine for free!
In case you're curious how I found the time to add that easter egg to the game, I experimented with simlultaneously releasing Ducky's Delivery Service in nine languages and almost-simultaneously releasing it on PC and console. This meant that I had lots of free time towards the end of development, when I was waiting for the translators to finish translating the game and for the console platform's QA team to finish testing the game.
I spent that time finishing all of the little extra features I wanted to add to Ducky's Delivery Service and taking a vacation, but I still had a bit of extra time left afterwards. My friend Chunderfins told me about his idea of getting people to put cheats in their indie games and making a little zine out of it, so I jumped on the opportunity to sneak a cheat into Ducky's Delivery Service.
I had fun making it and I hope you have a good time messing around with it too! I should probably put a silly cheat in my new game too, if I can think of one.
Anything else?
Itch had its arm twisted into deindexing all adult content by its payment processors. Similar things happened to Steam and Fansly recently too, and have happened to several other sites in the past, including Patreon. Thankfully a lot of people are finally starting to fight back to a degree that I haven't seen before, and I sincerely hope that this energy continues. I don't want to live in a world that heavily restricts people's ability to create legal adult content or make money from it, and I especially don't want two or three international payment processing companies to be in charge of deciding who is or isn't allowed to get paid for the legal content they create.
I watched this talk on programming vehicles in video games a few days ago (also available as an article). I previously knew nothing about how racing game car physics were programmed and I found it fascinating. I'll try to resist the urge to drop everything and program a top-down racer...
Now that I've cleared Violent Storm, I have once again become obsessed with Mr. Driller. I cleared 2000m mode of Mr. Driller 2 while collecting all of the air capsules last week and did the same thing in Mr. Driller G yesterday, both of which are much harder than anything else I’ve done in the series before. Once I've gotten comfortable with Mr. Driller G’s extra hard North Pole stage, I think I'd like to make a quick video on how to get started with Mr. Driller and why I think it's good. It's a great game and I wish more people played it!
That's all I've been up to recently. I'm going to get back to resting for the rest of the week, and next week I'll get back to working on a demo. I hope you have a wonderful couple of weeks and I'll see you next time!