The Day I Died
The Day I Died Soundtrack - with a bonus track!
You can listen to a sample of all three tracks here.
If you love music and would consider buying this title for the music only - I think the price tag goes nice even with that.
Some background info about the bonus track & the future of this game or any new ones, for those who are interested:
As you probably assumed from looking at the store page, selling didn't go very well for this title. It's OK, I didn't expect getting rich from this game, I just wanted to create a title strong enough to be published, good enough to be fun to play, and I had high hopes I will earn enough to start coding the next one (probably an even if not much better one).
The sad thing is, for being "a noob" in this business, I was scammed by 3rd parties with different parts of the game, that I couldn't create by myself (I couldn't afford to hire full time guys so I had to go for "freelancers").
This resulted in lower quality (and with it, a lower price tag), a "weaker gaming experience" on a very busy market, where content and fun ideas or gameplay is not enough anymore: even the highest standards may not prove enough for success.
I have no hard feelings and not telling you this to feel sorry for me: I learned a lot from this experience, both about people, the gaming business and how prices and selling go in general, so even though I spent all my savings creating this game and not even 1% of it came back, I say it worth it for the experience and for what I learned from this.
The reason I described the above is, I had this other title in my mind for a very, very long time now (along with billions of others), codenamed "EWAC", "Elite Warriors: Commando", which was inspired by two old games, 'Ikari Warriors Elite' and 'Commando', and would have had been a cool mixture of the two, rethinked and redesigned, "modernized", "facelifted" so to speak with a lot of great features in a thrilling and exciting, fast pace and very rapid gameplay.
Now, looking at how much would this cost, and the ratio by which I can save money (I work for living so... uhhh...), this title most likely will never happen.
But as I bought one of the music tracks, the most inspiried one a few years ago, to make at least a bit of this dream come true, and it is awesome, I didn't want it to be lost forever without anyone (except for me) enjoying it.
So... Enjoy!
Over & Out
( Here's a direct link to the DLC in case it does not appear for you on the store page for some reason; you can find the three -mp3- tracks in a 'dlc' folder on the game install path)
MAJOR Update v1.1: GFX Revamp!
Please leave a (hopefully positive) review if you enjoyed playing this game. Thanks!
Change log
* UPDATE As mentioned above, revamped the look of the game, upgraded it as much as I could. It was "too gray" and "washed out", now everything looks better and much deeper in colors; the environment is a little darker now, but it also has much better contrast. The downside is, minimum system requirements were updated and from now on, have to be taken more seriously: the game doesn't run anymore on very old/outdated computers. On the other hand, based on feedbacks so far, the new looks worth it. I hope you'll feel the same way.
* UPDATE / STEAM STORE Replaced the gameplay clip, as well as the screenshots on the store page to reflect the new/actual look of the game. I also added a longer gameplay clip (still trying to avoid any spoilers, so the game doesn't show all it's potential), as well as a few more screens that I had before.
* UPDATE Some players mentioned they didn't like they had to search for items "with the mouse", i.e. by "looking around". I agreed with their reasoning, so I added a soft, barely but visible 'marker light' on 'Pick Up Items' as well as on 'World Items'. The base color is purple for the prior ones and green for the latter however, as you probably know: colors mix. It's in their nature. So some items reflect a different color than the base, marker one. E.g. purple on yellow reflects red and there's nothing one can do about this, as there's no color to mix with yellow for a purple reflection. Bear this in mind and focus on "decoloration patch", instead of seeking a particular color on screen.
* UPDATE I added some extra features, stronger cookie ("cookie" == light beam "shadow") and a better color for the flashlight beam so it's more realistic and looks nicer now (see it in action close to the end of the gameplay clip).
* FIX One was able to walk through [wording: to avoid spoilers] "the search cabinet" after "a particular event"; this is not possible anymore (thanks flies to brett055 for letting me know!).
* FIX If your system has hardware issues and goes blue screen, or it goes off e.g. for a blackout, so some radical, unexpected way, at some particular points in the game the save file got corrupted. Even though this event is very unlikely, it happened to a friend who helped me with some testing, because of a failing RAM module. I finally figured out how to overcome this issue, so I added some extra safety (kind of "fault tolerance") so the save file corruption cannot happen anymore.
* FIX There were some light bleeding issues here and there, I tried to look close and fixed all I found. Let me know if there's more.
* FIX There was a z-fight at one place ("flickering") on the wall, eliminated.
* NOTE I did not retake the cutscene clips, so those reflect the old look of the environment when they play out. It is not disturbing or look bad or anything, so I hope you won't find this an issue either. The reason I didn't update this part is, the higher environment/gfx/playback quality resulted in a lower recording quality, so the final clips in my judgement looked worse than the outstanding ones - hence the decision, to keep the old ones. If I can figure out something for this, I'll update the cutscene clips as well of course.
* NOTE Waterballoon labels sometimes flicker from some angles, and to make it worse, on some PCs only. As soon as I find out why, I'll address this issue.
I hope you like the game better now and keep (or will) enjoy playing it!
Before/After pics
See the screenshots and gameplay clip for higher resolution of the current look and feel of the game
Grumpy (before, after)
IT Room (before, after)
Kitchen (before, after)
Small Front Lab (before, after)
Compressor Room (before, after)
Update v1.0.2
- A cabinet had a lack of colliders so the player was able to walk through it. This magic is gone now.
- On older screens with weaker contrast, the flashlight's light "blinded" the action text ("at the site of use", to avoid spoilers), in one instance it literally turned the text invisible. Altered the flashlight's beam color and intensity so it doesn't do this anymore
There also was an issue with Steam Update behaviour. It either overwritten save games or not when I patched the game - for which I had to alter build settings, as well as the way I'm handling saves, to sort this issue out for good.
This may cause the save game file get overwritten one last time (and never again!). If this happens to you, sorry for the inconvenience.
Update v1.0.1
* A floor at one spot turned invisible after coming back from the -1st floor,
and,
* In-game the How To Play screens were not displayed correctly
Thank you for reporting these errors!
The game is now released!
I was thinking about the Q&A I mentioned earlier. You can visit the game's publisher page and leave a comment:
https://www.facebook.com/bitgimmicks/
If you prefer Steam, that's another option (Community Hub) of course. Feel free to use whichever media you like.
Thanks again for buying the game. I hope you'll have a lot of fun playing it!
Q&A After Release?
While I keep searching for inexpensive ways to promote the game I bump into sites here and there with one thing in common: people firing away a lot of questions around the topic of 'indie game development'.
So I was wondering if it was a good idea to create a Q&A platform, where anyone can ask questions from me - which I of course, try to answer with the best of my knowledge.
Build passed verification: The game is on schedule
I really hope most players will like the game. Even if I don't break even (high chance I believe), that's what I really wish for. Positive reviews, happy players.
A few more days!