The Quack Button
Hello again! Lots of things happened this week, so I'll get right to it:
The Quack Button
When I made the credits music for Ducky's Delivery Service last week, I had secretly been playing around with the idea of adding some duck quacking sounds over the top of the music, to make it sound like Ducky was singing a song. I liked it, but I got carried away and started thinking about letting people quack along with the end credits themselves by pressing a button.
I was talking to a friend about this, and they suggested adding a quack button that you could use during gameplay. I had been thinking about doing this for a while, but I had decided against it because I'd already sent the game's text off to be translated and I didn't want to annoy all the translators by having to ask them for an extra word (so I could add 'Quack' to the list of buttons on the control config screen).
But now that I knew that there was a demand for a quack button, I thought I'd give it a try just to see how it felt. So I added a quack button that worked during gameplay, cutscenes, the world map and the end credits:
I played around with it for a while and it was way more fun with it than I expected, so it's staying in the game. I hope you enjoy quacking as much as I do when the game comes out!
I made the tutorial music
The tutorial music is done! It's based on an old prototype song that I abandoned in January, back when I was trying to figure out what this game's music should sound like. I think it's one of my favorite pieces of music in the game:
All of my favorite games are frantic arcadey action games with very little downtime, but I love making the kind of music that would be at home in a relaxing slice-of-life section of an RPG or visual novel. My gamedev curse...
Only two pieces of music remain: the volcano area and the main menu. Unfortunately I've wasted a couple of days this week by struggling to get the volcano area's music sounding right. But I'll keep trying! I might have to change it from a scary frantic "final area in an action game" mood to a cool jazzy "cave with some lava in it" mood, but it should be fine regardless. The game's music is so close to being done!
The other thing I did this week was to add some difficulty progression to the secret post-game unlockable extra (SPOILERS!) that I talked about back in April. The difficulty now ramps up as you score more points, instead of instantly starting at maximum difficulty like in the video that I just linked.
Ducky's Delivery Service will be at Wholesome Direct 2023!
Wholesome Direct is an annual event showcasing "wholesome games", which basically means games about twee little animals walking around outside and doing jobs. If you want to see a videogame about a frog watering a plant, a fox running a café or a duck delivering a present, Wholesome Direct is the place to go. I'm being a bit flippant with that description, but my own game's presentation falls into that stereotype so hopefully it's okay for me to do that. For a better idea of the sorts of things they show there, here's last year's presentation.
Frankly I'm not 100% sure what the average Wholesome Direct viewer will think of the gameplay in Ducky's Delivery Service. The games that usually get featured at Wholesome Direct tend to be very low-stakes and relaxing, with a very low difficulty level or often with no failure condition whatsoever. Hopefully some of the people who watch Wholesome Direct will want to play Ducky's Delivery Service anyway, but I'll have to make sure that the game's Steam page makes it obvious that it's a fast tricky action game. I really don't want to accidentally misrepresent the game to sell it to an audience who wouldn't enjoy it!
Wholesome Direct isn't the only online indie game showcase that will feature Ducky's Delivery Service. There's another one coming up soon, but I don't know if I'm allowed to announce that my game will be there. Speaking of online indie game showcases that are coming up soon, INDIE Live Expo 2023 is happening on Saturday! It's a Japanese event that is streamed in English, Japanese and Chinese, and this year they're showing off more than 300 games!
Chessplosion was featured in their 2021 event, and I'm really looking forward to watching this year's stream too. Despite it being a large event, its wide variety of games (often with very low budgets) really reminds me of the Comiket doujin game trailer compilations or the SAGE trailers, where you never know what you're going to see next. It's a big celebration of all the weird and wonderful indie games that people are coming up with, and I love it.
Help I have been playing too many arcade games
It has always bugged me that I don't like traditional arcade-style beat em ups like Final Fight or Streets of Rage. I love shmups and fighting games and racing games and run n' guns and lightgun games and basically every other popular arcade genre, but beat em ups always felt too random and unpredictable and unfair to me. But lots of people who I respect seem to enjoy them, and I wanted to give them another try.
So I tried out lots of different beat em ups and I ended up getting into Knights of the Round! It turns out that the way to make me enjoy a beat em up is to give me a character with a long sword. You don't need to worry about enemies randomly hitting you with unreactable jabs if you can simply poke them from outside their jab range. So if anyone else wants to get into beat em ups but always found them to be a bit too random and unfair, maybe you'll like Knights of the Round too!
I don't think I want to make a pure beat em up any time soon, but it would be fun to make something inspired by them. Maybe an action game like 2D Zelda, except with the same sorts of crowd control and spacing and hitstun and throw system that you find in beat em ups. As most people here probably know, I've been a competitive fighting game player for a long time, so it would be nice to put that genre knowledge to use in one of my own games!
In other arcade news, Mr. Driller 2 just got emulated last month, over 20 years after its release! So I used that as an excuse to get obsessed with the series once again. I managed to get a perfect run on 1000m mode (no deaths, all air capsules), and I'm going to try to do the same on 2000m mode next. If you're at all interested in arcade action games, you should really try out the Mr. Driller series! Despite all of the brightly colored blocks that sometimes explode in chain reactions, it's a pretty straightforward action game; you're just trying to drill down and survive. So don't be put off if you're not into puzzle games!
I'm still not 100% sure what I'm going to make after Ducky's Delivery Service. But whatever I end up going with, I'm sure it will be heavily influenced by arcade games. I really don't want to turn into a grumpy old person who complains that arcade games from the 90s are better than modern PC and console games...but those old games really are good! I hope I can make something that is fun in the same way that those games are.
Anyway, that's my week! Sorry for all the rambling; I've been thinking about arcade games a lot. Let me know what you think about the quack button and the tutorial music, and let me know if you have any favorite arcade games! I don't think my arcade obsession is going to stop anytime soon, so I'd love to know which games I should try next.