(This was originally posted on cohost, hence the lowercase) when i wrote the postmortem for my game ducky’s delivery service a few months ago, i mentioned that even though i ended up making the exact game that i wanted to make, i still wasted far too much time stressing out over whether or not the game would have mass appeal. i even spent a few days prototyping a feature that i didn’t care about, just because i thought it might make the game appeal to a wider audience of players (that didn’t include myself).

This was originally posted on cohost, hence the lowercase. Lily Valeen asked me: “what is the best meal you’ve ever eaten??”. I talked about that a bit, and then posted this: not to be confused with the funniest meal i ever had, which is when me and another fighting game player went to the huge mcdonalds near the ceotaku venue in orlando to try their pizza and pasta (it’s not very good).

I’ve been making games for a very long time at this point, so here are the game development articles and resources that have helped me the most over the years. I kept putting off writing this post because I was worried I’d accidentally forget a really good article or two, but I can always just go back and edit them in when I inevitably remember them later. Anyway, here they are, roughly organized by topic.

Hi! Before I became a solo indie developer and made games like Chessplosion and Ducky’s Delivery Service, I spent over a decade working for other game studios. I was mostly a gameplay programmer at AAA studios (~150 people) and “big indie” studios (~15 people), and I’ve done some engine/tools programming and some game design consultant work too. I was going to write a big post on the game production process but I realized that most of it is pretty obvious.

Someone asked me: “hello mrs. dev. pls help me understand how the scoring works in ducky’s delivery service. i’m having trouble with 3 star clears and my crops are dying D’:” Hello! Thank you so much for playing Ducky’s Delivery Service, and thanks for asking! Getting three stars on a stage can be pretty tricky, and you can clear the entire game just by getting two stars on each stage. Although by the time you’re getting towards the end of the game, it might be easier to go back and get three stars in the earlier stages instead of trying to get two stars in the later stages.

(This was originally posted on cohost. I later recorded a commentated video of the game’s hardest difficulty mode) I’ve been playing this game for a couple of months and I was beginning to think I’d never get the clear, but I somehow pulled it off on stream today! (stream highlight here if you want to see me ramble to my stream chat while playing) Gun.Smoke is one of the best games I’ve played this year!

Hello! A year ago I wrote a blog post about my goals for 2023, along with a recap of what I did in 2022. So I thought I’d do it again this year! What I did this year Released Ducky’s Delivery Service on PC and Nintendo Switch I finished my game Ducky’s Delivery Service and released it on Steam, itch and Nintendo Switch. I’m very happy with how it turned out, but I wrote a postmortem if you want to read all about it in excruciating detail.

Hello! It’s been five months since my solo-developed duck delivery action game Ducky’s Delivery Service launched on Nintendo Switch, Steam and itch.io, so it felt like a good time to write a postmortem. I want to keep making lots of indie games in the future, so it’s always worth looking at how I can improve my development process. I thought I’d talk about what went right, what went wrong, what I’m not sure about, and what I can try in the future if I want my games to become more financially sustainable.

Today I launched a Patreon, full of rewards for people who want to help me keep making games! You can get early access to my new games and soundtracks, weekly game dev diary updates, your name in the credits, and even access to work-in-progress builds and prototypes, such as the original shooting game prototype of Ducky’s Delivery Service. Check it out if you’re interested, and thank you for supporting my work!

Ducky’s Delivery Service has an optional time attack mode for all of its flyer delivery and special delivery stages. The S rank times for these stages can get pretty difficult, especially because you can deliver flyers in any order you want, making it tricky to find a fast enough route. So I thought I would upload a video of all the S rank times, in case you want to get an S rank on a specific stage but you’re not sure if your route is fast enough.