New Ducky's Delivery Service music, and starting the long process of finishing a game
Hi again! I'm fully rested after last week's vacation and I'm back at work on Ducky's Delivery Service. Here's what I've been working on:
I made some more music!
When I started working after my vacation, I thought I was going to spend the whole week working on music. So I finished the story event music that I was working on a few weeks ago:
Fun fact: this track reuses the drums from Chessplosion's main menu music! But I liked those drums in Chessplosion and I like them here too, so hopefully people don't mind.
I then made a slower, jazzier version of the same track. It plays when you complete a special delivery request:
I've been trying to sneak more jazz organ into my soundtracks, so I'm happy I got to do it here!
I realized that other things are more urgent than working on the music
In last week's newsletter, I mentioned that most of the wishlists for Ducky's Delivery Service were from Japan. The Japanese article that caused the big bump in wishlists is here, if you're curious!
This got me thinking about things like translations and console releases. Ideally I would like to release Ducky's Delivery Service on a popular console that has a handheld mode and a docked mode. It would be great to release it in as many regions as possible, including Japan, and ideally I'd like to try and release it in July, just like the PC version. Or at least as close to July as possible.
But it takes a long time for console companies to test games, and I'll need to hire a translator to translate the game into Japanese before the console company can even begin testing the Japanese release. So if I want to get the game released on consoles at a reasonable time, I need to hire some translators as soon as possible. Then I can go back and make the remaining music and sound effects while the translators are busy working on the game.
And that's what I've been working towards! I'm trying to finish everything except for the rest of the music and sound effects, so I can be confident that the game's text is 100% complete and won't need to change. Then I can hire some translators!
Finishing a game is scary
Ducky's Delivery Service is a strange game, and I'm not completely sure what people will think about it when they play it. So before sending a game to translators, I had to ask myself lots of scary questions like: Is the game truly finished? Am I happy with it? Is it okay if this exact version of the game is the one that everyone gets to play?
The answer was mostly yes, but I had a few small concerns. First off, I was a bit worried that everyone else would get bored of repeatedly flying back and forth across the same small levels delivering lots of packages. I worry too much in general so there was a chance that I was worrying about nothing here, but it had been bugging me for a few months so I thought I'd at least try to figure out why I felt this way.
After playing through the game again, it turned out that 25% of the levels were a bit too small and repetitive for a full ~5 minute run. So I opened up the level editor, expanded all of those levels, tested them out, and did a few speedruns of all of them so I could give them some new S-rank time trial times. For example, here's how I expanded one of the beach levels:
After playing through these larger levels, I'm very happy with how the game feels. So it's the time to look at the next thing on my list of worries...
In Ducky's Delivery Service, there's a lot of stuff you can do after reaching the end of the story and seeing the credits. The most obvious thing is to try and earn the maximum amount of stars on every level in the game, but the game didn't give you a reward for collecting all the stars. So I've decided to add a little secret something, to give completionists a satisfying ending! I'm still a couple of days away from finishing this feature, but I think people will like it.
The only other thing that bugs me about the game is the story mode writing. It's serviceable but the characters don't really have much of a personality. I'm going to work on this next week, and then I'll finally have a version of the game that I'm completely happy with and I'll be able to send the text off to get translated!
Thanks for supporting me!
So that's where I'm at with Ducky's Delivery Service! The release date is four months away, but it feels like I've finally started the long process of finishing the game. As always, the best way to support the game is to wishlist it on Steam or tell other people about it. I hope you like the new music in today's newsletter, and I'll see you next week with another progress update!