My next game is Ducky's Delivery Service!

Making a logo

Creating logos is not my strong suit, so I wanted to make something that was quick and easy. Ideally it would be so quick and easy to make that I could make translated logos for other languages, if any translators end up wanting to change the name of the game in their language. So I went through all 222 fonts in the "Handwriting" section of Google Fonts and chose the cutest one, then put an outline around it.

I initially wrote this section without mentioning the game's name, even going so far as to make a fake "DUCK GAME LOGO" logo. But it's much easier to just use the real thing, so: my new game is called Ducky's Delivery Service! I think the name is cute and it gets the theme of the game across, and I hope you like it as much as I do. Here's the logo:
Because I was already in a logo-making mood, I decided to make the pixel art version of the logo that would appear on the title screen. My first attempts didn't go great; I tried turning anti-aliasing on and off while resizing the logo, but this made it look too blurry and too sharp respectively when compared to the rest of the title screen. I wanted something more like the pixel art anti-aliasing that I manually added one pixel at a time to the inner corners of the outlines while drawing my cutscene portrait sprites:

But I didn't want to manually add anti-aliasing to every letter in the logo, in every language, for every pixel art game that I ever make. So I wrote a program that does it for me! Here's how it looks on the title screen:

And here's a closeup of the automatic anti-aliasing:
I adjusted the outline thickness a bit in this screenshot compared to the earlier 'E' examples, but hopefully the anti-aliasing difference still comes across. I feel like this doesn't clash with the rest of the screen anywhere near as much as the original too-blurry and too-jagged attempts! My automatic anti-aliasing program is currently hard-coded to only work with the colors of my game's logo, but maybe one day I'll try and turn it into something more useful like an automatic Aseprite script. We'll see!

Making the game automatically take screenshots for me

Another thing I needed to do was to take a bunch of screenshots for the Steam and itch store pages. This took a long time for Chessplosion, because whenever the game was translated into a new language, I had to go back and manually take screenshots in those languages. I'd have to load up the save state for a screenshot, switch the game's language to the new one, press the Print Screen key, paste the image into an editing program, save it with the appropriate filename, and repeat this for each of the screenshots.

Whenever I was doing this, I would daydream about one day making a "Save All Screenshots" button that could automatically do this for every language. After manually taking a couple of screenshots of my new game, I instantly remembered how annoying the whole progress was and I decided to make the Save All Screenshots button right there and then. Now all I need to do is make a save state for each screenshot, and the Save All Screenshots button will automatically save a png of each one in every language, with filenames that will let Steam's developer backend autodetect the language:

(Disclaimer: I haven't reached out to any translators yet for this game! The list of languages and the example translated menu text in the video were both taken from Chessplosion's translations)

Making animated gifs

Steam and itch both let you embed animated gifs in a game's store page, so I recorded some! The file size limits are low, which meant I only had a couple of seconds to try and explain the game. Here's the first gif that people will see on Steam and itch:
Hopefully it gives people an idea of what the game is about and makes it look fun to play! The other gifs show the different environments and hazards in the game, along with a bit of cutscene dialogue:
I mostly just think that Spinach is fun to look at, so I'm glad I get to make everyone who visits my game's store page look at them.

Writing lots of marketing text

Online stores are full of text! Steam pages need a short description of the game, a long "about this game" section and a list of features, and itch needs your game to have a very short tagline. So I had to spend a while writing things like "Master the flight physics, grow your delivery business, fulfill special delivery requests from other ducks, and earn time attack ranks and high scores" and "Propeller-powered duck delivery action!". It's not the most fun thing in the world to write, but you gotta do it.


And that's been my week! My recent burst of doctor's appointments has thankfully come to an end, and I should be able to get back to working on music from now on. Once I have a music track that will work well in a trailer, I'll make a trailer and announce Ducky's Delivery Service to the world!

I talked about a lot this week, wow. Let me know what you think of it, and I'll be back next week with an update on my music!