Thank you all for playing the demo and giving feedback! I made some changes
People have been giving feedback on the demo!
In case you missed last week's newsletter, the Ducky's Delivery Service demo is out now on Steam and itch.io!
It's been great to finally get the game into players' hands, so I can watch people play it and hear their feedback! My favorite thing I've seen so far is this clip of CodeChannel, and I feel like I should also link the clip of her getting an S rank to make up for linking that other one.
In the week that the demo has been out, I've made some changes based on everyone's feedback:
- The music in Oak Town lasts longer now! You can hear the new version starting at 0:45 in the Steam store page trailer.
- Buzzer beaters are now possible. If you throw a package just before you run out of time and it lands in the mailbox after the time is up, you still get the points for it!
- The arrow at the edge of your screen that shows you where to deliver your package now slightly fades to grey when the mailbox is far away, to add a subtle hint of how close you are to your destination.
- I fixed a bug in my game engine that would cause Steam builds of my games to fail to save any data on most PCs when Steam Cloud is disabled.
That last bug didn't just affect Ducky's Delivery Service, it was affecting Chessplosion too! So I released a small Chessplosion update that fixed the issue, along with a couple of other tiny bugfixes.
Thank you so much to everyone who has given feedback so far! The game wouldn't be as good as it is without you!
It's nice when people play your game :)
When I released the demo, I was mostly thinking about how I could get some feedback and make sure that the game wasn't too buggy or broken. I'm grateful for both of those things, but I wasn't expecting that my favorite part of putting out my demo would be simply getting to see a bunch of people playing it.
As a solo developer who sits in a room and makes a game by themselves, it's easy to get stuck in a bit of a negative spiral of assuming that no one else will care about the game when it's done. Especially when the most popular advice on making commercial indie games repeatedly insists that developers should chase popular indie game genres (city building, horror, roguelikes and so on) if they want players to care. One of my goals for 2023 is to ignore that advice and just make what I want to make, but my attitude was more like "I'm going to make this game that I think is cool, even though I don't think anyone else will feel the same way about it". Even though I wasn't following the advice on chasing popular genres, I still believed deep down that this would result in other people not caring about the game.
So it has been a huge relief to see people streaming the demo, recording their playthroughs, and posting their thoughts on scoring strategies! I didn't see that coming at all, and it feels fantastic to know that there's an audience out there. After spending months balancing levels and adjusting sprites, it's easy become detached from the fact that you're making something that people are going to play and enjoy. I'm feeling so much better now, and I can't wait to finish this game and make even more games for you all to play!
As a bonus, it's nice to know that I'm not the only person out there who is interested in this odd combination of Balloon Fight, Crazy Taxi and Paperboy. I'm strange in a lot of ways, but at least my taste in games isn't completely unrelatable...
My biggest regret with all of this is that I didn't release a demo earlier! For my next game, I think I'll try to get a Steam store page and a demo up as soon as possible. In part so I can get helpful feedback from players, and in part so I won't have to spend months worrying about whether or not anyone will care about the game that I'm secretly making in a room by myself.
To paraphrase Super Mario: thank you so much for to playing my demo. I appreciate it.
That's all I've got for this week. I'd love to know any thoughts you have about the demo, of course, and I'll be back with another update next Thursday!