Why I'm switching my game from widescreen to 4:3
Hi again! I’m back from vacation and I’m making more music for my game, but last week I got distracted and…
I switched my game from widescreen to 4:3
My game’s combat always had a few issues in 16:9 widescreen arenas: the extra horizontal space meant it was easier to run away from enemies and lure them all into lining up horizontally, it was hard to keep track of enemies standing on the opposite horizontal side of the room in your peripheral vision (resulting in getting sniped by cats and penguins from a distance), and it took too long to walk from one side of a room to the other. I know that last one sounds silly, but if I was all the way on the left side of a widescreen room and the last enemy remaining was all the way on the right, I would genuinely get bored walking across the screen to hit them. This was even more of an issue when traversing the overworld in adventure mode.
So I switched the game to 4:3, and edited all of the levels, boss attacks, HUD elements and menus to fit in the new aspect ratio.
I added some borders for people playing the game on widescreen monitors too, using the Ducky’s Delivery Service menu sprites as a placeholder. Once I have a better idea of the game's setting and art direction I'll design some cute borders that sell the fact that you're looking down at the game world from above. Maybe there could be a crowd watching the game?
New music, new headphones
I picked up some new headphones (ATH-M50x if you’re curious) and now I’m having a much, much easier time hearing bass frequencies than I was before. After spending a few hours getting used to them, I was shocked to discover how muddy the low frequencies were in my new game’s music. So I learned a lot about mixing music (huge thanks to Jaelights for all the help), fixed as much as I could, and recorded some new music too.
Here’s the game’s boss theme, along with an updated mix of what is probably going to be the final stage theme:
I love how both of them turned out and I can’t wait to make some more music! Writing a big cheesy growly MIDI sax solo for the boss theme was surprisingly embarrassing at first, as if I was standing on a stage and everyone was going to laugh at me if I messed up and misjudged how cool I thought it was. But all my favorite art is earnest, heartfelt and personal, so if my favorite artists can lay their hearts bare for the world to see, the least I can do is work up the courage to put a potentially silly saxophone solo in a boss track.
Here’s how the boss theme sounds in the game:
I hope you like it too! I can’t wait to get some sound effects in there too, for the full arcade action game experience.
Ducky’s Delivery Service’s one year anniversary!
This Saturday is the one year anniversary of Ducky's Delivery Service! I can't believe it's been out for so long. I'll have to spend the day relaxing and playing through it to celebrate. Thank you so much to everyone who supported my strange little duck videogame!
Compost #5
This Saturday is also Compost #5! A bunch of people are going to make little songs in 1-2 hours based on a theme, then post them on cohost. I had a great time making my MIDI acoustic guitar song A Cake For You for Compost #4, so I'm looking forward to taking part in this one too. You should give it a go yourself if you're interested!
It’s Evo week so Chessplosion is on sale!
Evo is this weekend, so Steam is discounting lots of fighting games. Even though Chessplosion isn't a fighting game, I decided to discount it this week anyway because:
It's made by an Evo champion (me)
It has competitive multiplayer with rollback netcode for 2-4 players (which I coded between my matches during the Evo tournament that I won)
It was the grand finals of Frosty Faustings' mystery game tournament last year
So if you know anyone who wants Chessplosion, they can save 50% on it this week!
Anything else?
I managed to clear a couple of loops of SonSon! I recorded the run with commentary here and I wrote up a bit more about its design here. If you want to play the game yourself, it comes free with Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium on PC and modern consoles!
That’s all I’ve been up to. Hope you have a great couple of weeks, and I hope you enjoy Compost #5 if you end up giving it a try. See you next time!