Steam Next Fest, Wholesome Direct, demo improvements and a t-shirt!
Steam Next Fest
The demo of Ducky's Delivery Service is already out on Steam and itch, so there's a good chance you've already played it. But if not, the Steam Next Fest is a good excuse to give it a try!
Wholesome Direct
Ducky's Delivery Service was part of last week's Wholesome Direct 2023 showcase! It sneaked in at the montage towards the end, at the 55:05 mark:
The reception to the game was much better than I expected! As much as I love my game, I was worried that it might not be the greatest fit for the Wholesome Direct audience. It's a difficult 2D action game after all, not a relaxing farming simulator or exploration game. It doesn't even have any witches or frogs or mushroom hats...
But lots of people seemed to really like it! I've been blown away by how many people I've seen talking about Ducky's Delivery Service and streaming it in the past week. Thank you all again for all of your feedback on the demo over the past few weeks. It's thanks to you that the new players are having the best experience possible!
One more thing about Wholesome Direct: Ducky managed to sneak onto this year's shirt! They're in the top-left corner:
It's being sold by The Yetee, orders are available through June 30th, and $5 from each shirt will benefit AbleGamers. Here's the link if you're interested!
I need to order one myself, but I'm so tall that I'm still trying to decide between ordering the size that's the right width (L) or the right height (3XL). I think I might just have to order the L and accept that I'm going to have a Wholesome Direct crop top. But for anyone without a ridiculously long torso, you'll be fine!
Demo improvements
In last week's newsletter I mentioned that I wanted to make a couple more improvements to the demo. They're now in the game! I made a small improvement to the Skip Level option in Assist Mode, but the biggest change was that I made the 4 star unlock condition a bit more obvious.
If you get enough points on a stage to get 3 stars, the stage instantly ends and any remaining time is converted into bonus points. But if you have lots and lots of extra time, those bonus points can push your score high enough to get a secret 4 star rating! You don't have to get any 4 star scores to clear the game, but they're mentioned at the end of the demo and in some achievements so I've had a few people asking me about how to unlock them.
So now you can see the fourth star filling up as you get your time bonus:
The only downside is that it makes getting your first 3 star score a bit less satisfying. Instead of thinking "I got a perfect score!", now it's more of a "wait, there's a 4 star score!?" situation. But that's exciting in its own way, and at least the people who want to go for 4 star scores know how to to do it now.
Everything else
I've been doing a bit more work on getting the remaining translations into the game, but none of them are ready to play yet. Hopefully a few new languages will be playable in time for Steam Next Fest!
The other main chunk of work I've been doing this week is getting my game engine ready for my next game. Both Ducky's Delivery Service and Chessplosion were written in my own game engine, and I've kind of been making the engine as I go. I love how my game engine works and I want to keep using it for any games I make in the future, but there's currently not much separation between the "engine" part of my code and the "game" part.
So if I decide to make a new game, I can't just open up my game engine and hit "new project" like you would in a normal game engine. Instead, I have take all of my code from Ducky's Delivery Service, copy and paste it into a new folder, and carefully delete every individual little part of the Ducky's Delivery Service code that I don't want to use in the next game.
This is a pretty slow way of starting a new game, and I really don't want to have to keep doing this every single time I make a game. So I've been trying to make a "blank game" template that I can start from. This is a lot of work, but it will be worth it!
That's all I've been up to this week. The release date of July 20th is only five weeks away, so I'd better get back to work. I'll be back next Thursday with another update!