spikevegeta hyping up Ducky's Delivery Service! Also consoles, Steam Next Fest, and more demo improvements
Steam Next Fest is happening right now!
Steam Next Fest is happening this week! There are tons of demos for upcoming games playable right now, including Ducky's Delivery Service. So go give them a try! I've only had the chance to play a couple of demos so far myself but I'm planning on trying way more of them this weekend. If you've already played some Steam Next Fest demos and you have any recommendations, please let me know!
It's been great to see so many people playing Ducky's Delivery Service this week. The biggest surprise so far was GDQ announcer spikevegeta hyping up the game on Valve's official Steam Next Fest stream:
I hope the speedrunning community ends up enjoying the game as much as he thinks it will! I've been having way too much fun speedrunning the game by myself while developing it, and would love to see other speedrunners push it to the next level. It would be amazing to see Ducky's Delivery Service in GDQ one day!
Balancing the scoring formula
This week I made a few more changes to the demo. The biggest one is that I changed the formula for earning a 4 star score. If you manage to reach the 3 star score (50,000 points), the game ends and you receive bonus points for all of your remaining time. If this pushes your score high enough, you get rewarded with a 4 star score. I do this instead of just making you play out the game until you run out of time, because I'm personally not a fan of endless score attack games that drag on indefinitely.
Previously you got a fairly small bonus score for each remaining second, and you needed to push your score up from 50,000 points to 55,000 points to get a 4 star score. This meant you could give yourself a big advantage by intentionally trying to pick the exact right sizes of packages to push your score as far as possible past 50,000 before getting the time bonus, such as getting your score up to 49,900 points and then delivering a long-distance package to take your score up to 52,000 before the time bonus was rewarded. Even if you lost time by doing this, the time bonus was so small that it didn't matter.
So now the time bonus is slightly more than double what it used to be, and the 4 star score threshold has increased from 55,000 points to 60,000. So those extra couple thousand points from messing with package sizes are only half as important as they used to be, and the time that you lose from doing that is over twice as important as it used to be.
In short: the main way to get a 4 star score is still the same as it always was: try to reach the 3 star score limit with at least 30 seconds remaining. But now the luck factor of hoping for a lucky final package is much less of a big deal than it was before, so hopefully it now feels more like you can just play as fast as possible without having to worry about anything else.
Translations and a console release
Lots of finished translations came in this week. Ducky's Delivery Service is now fully playable in eight languages: English, French, Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean!
Now that these translations are all done, I'm finally able to start the long process of submitting the game to a certain popular console that has a handheld mode and a docked mode. In fact, I'm going to start this immediately after I finish writing this newsletter.
I've never published a console game myself before so I have no idea how long the process will take, but I've heard it usually takes at least two months or so. Ducky's Delivery Service is releasing on July 20th which is exactly 4 weeks away (!!!) so unfortunately that means there's no way for it to be available on console on day one. But I'll do my best to get it approved as soon as I can!
Anyway, those are the main things I've been up to this week. I hope you find some fun new games in Steam Next Fest and I'll be back next Thursday with another update!