I’m excited to announce the release of soundStrider 1.0! The past seven months have truly been an amazing journey. With this release the game is feature complete and now available on Steam. I’m looking forward to supporting it with hotfixes and minor updates in the future. Thanks so much for playing and following along!

New trailer

Please enjoy a new trailer featuring the poison effect:

Introducing syngen

With this release I’m also excited to announce that its syngen engine has been released as open-source. Leveraging the Web Audio API, it provides tools to quickly create synthesized sounds and position them as props on a 2D stage. I’m looking forward to how this inspires folks to create more audio games that are accessible to all.

This weekend I will be entering the GMTK Jam to create a second game with this engine. Like Soundsearcher, it will be an audio game built in 48 hours. Fingers crossed!

In retrospect

To wrap up this chapter of my life I plan to write a post-mortem that reflects on its challenges, successes, and failures. With total transparency I will disclose statistics like time spent and revenue earned. Everything will be revealed on the shiftBacktick blog.

A companion to its post-mortem will be an interactive anthology. Combining 25 releases between 0.1.0 to 1.0.0 with their patch notes, you can experience its development and compare versions at your own pace. This will become freely available to all owners on itch.io.

I’m looking forward to sharing more soon!

v1.0.0 changes

• Added dynamic ranges
  • Added dynamic range selector to Audio Mixer screen
  • Added Boost preset for playing at low volumes
  • Added Normal preset for playing on headphones
  • Added High preset for playing on hi-fi speakers
  • Added Full preset with no processing whatsoever
  • Defaulted to Boost for existing players (closest to Beta 7 mix)
• Browser compatibility
  • Fixed MIDI hardlock in Firefox
  • Fixed rare storage hardlock in private browsing mode
  • Updated Browser Support section in the manual
• Instrument improvements
  • Allowed instrument controls on Instrument screen
  • Added stereo panning to instrument notes
  • Moved button for Instrument screen to Miscellaneous screen
  • Tweaked articulation on pad presets
• Quest improvements
  • Aligned breadcrumb ping volume with other navigational cues
  • Improved breadcrumb positioning
  • Improved music box sounds
  • Improved synthesis quest objective spawning
  • Improved winding key audibility
  • Increased distance between quest starts
  • Rebalanced quest durations to scale with count by type
  • Smoothed clockwork quest transitions
• Miscellaneous
  • Added audio notifications when toggling forward
  • Fixed issue with time played statistic incorrectly saving
  • Improved poison prop sound
  • Various engine improvements
  • Added an easter egg