June 2024 Recap

July 5 2024

I managed to release my first Playdate project, The Sweetest Sound , which is a short Pulp game about remembering names. I also released Pillow Fight earlier in June, which I discussed in my last monthly recap.

Pillow Fight has been received pretty well upon release and I'm quite proud of the project. It very much embodies my current aesthetic sensibilities from stacked sprites to deckbuilding to "sketchy" pixel art, even being themed by sleep, which is very personal to me.

I don't know if I'll continue working on Pillow Fight further, though I'm open to the idea. As of now, I'm happy with where it's at and am glad that it resonated with people.

The Sweetest Sound was a collaborative effort with my real life friend Michael, aka D-3PO . We met every 1-2 weeks for a 3-hour work session and worked on the game. There were a lot of laughs and I realized how fun it can be to work in-person with someone. It's also very good for not getting distracted, as you're literally right next to each other trying to work.

In The Sweetest Sound, you attend a party in space, meet people, and then have to remember one of their names (at random) when you leave the party. The game is named after a quote by Dale Carnegie (of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" fame) that reads, "remember that a name is to that person the sweetest [..] sound in any language".

Also, I want to learn to compose my own music so I'm going to try to learn how to do it with OpenMPT and trackers! I felt particularly inspired by Yesso's soundtrack for The Real Texas , which led me to discover that it was composed in this program and there are even source files for all the songs in the OST's link. If anyone out there wants to learn music composition and OpenMPT along with me, feel free to reach out! Maybe we can share our works in progress and keep each other accountable.