What kind of music is that, like a bossa nova beat?

                May 11, 2023

            What kind of music is that, like a bossa nova beat?

            Hello! This was another short week of working on Ducky's Delivery Service. I was doing some contract work on Friday, there was another public holiday on Monday, and I had to sort out a ton of medical stuff on Tuesday. But the good news is that after 16 months of waiting, I finally started HRT! So from this point onwards, please assume I look exactly like Jessica Rabbit.

Sorry about that last sentence. Here's some music
Fortunately I still had the time work on the game a bit this week. I sat down and got ready to write the main menu music...and felt an uncontrollable craving for bossa nova, so I made the ending credits music instead. This technically counts as spoilers because it's the music that plays while the credits scroll, but just in case you're in the mood to listen to some bossa nova, here it is:

I might make a couple of tweaks to it, but I like it already! Let me know what you think.

I did some behind-the-scenes work too
I submitted Ducky's Delivery Service to a few other promotional events, which involved making a demo of the game for the judges to test. And because I was in a demo-making mood, I submitted a demo of the game to Valve and they approved it too! This means that whenever I finish making the rest of the game's music, I'm allowed to release a demo on Steam for everyone to try.

Steam Next Fest starts on June 19th, so I'll definitely release the demo in time for that. But I might release it as soon as two or three weeks from now if everything goes well. So don't be surprised if I announce the demo's release in this newsletter soon!

And I made a few tiny last-minute tweaks
I needed a bit of a break from working on music on Wednesday, so I got some other small things out of the way. I updated the game's Chinese/Japanese/Korean font to the latest version, improved some of the sound effects, and made decimal numbers use the correct symbols in all of the game's languages. For example, the numbers "10,000" and "1.5" in English are written as "10.000" and "1,5" in Spanish and Portuguese:

That's all I did this week. In my spare time I've been playing a bunch of games for the old WonderSwan handheld, like Dicing Knight (an action roguelike in 2002!) and a surprisingly good port of Mr. Driller.

I've also been playing a bunch of arcade sports games from the 16-bit era, like Super Tennis, Sensible World of Soccer and Neo Turf Masters, but I have so much to say about them that I would need to spend an entire newsletter issue talking about them. Sorry in advance if I end up doing this! I just like these games a lot and I wish more people still played them...

I don't have any more contract work or public holidays coming up, so hopefully I'll have lots of new things to show you next week. See you then!

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