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MARDEK on Steam - Accessing the OST and pdfs?

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago784 words

I've finished preparing the OST and old notes, which took longer than expected! I have some questions about how players are used to accessing non-game files for their Steam purchases though...

I thought all I'd really need to do was package the soundtrack files and skim through the old notes, maybe I'd be done in an hour or two, but it's taken maybe around two days to get everything done.

The game itself now loads music files externally - unlike the browser version, where they were embedded in the swf, hence the poor sound quality - so technically you can access the music played in the game from its file folder. Those files are made for looping, though, so they harshly cut off at the end. Many of them don't have very presentable titles.

The OST arranges all the music in a way I think is more pleasing to listen to and much tidier to arrange. Each piece loops once and fades out at the end, and they've each got associated metadata which gives them a proper title and track number, meaning that you can listen to them in an intended order which tells a story (mostly the order that you encounter them in-game). This took a long time to do, and stupidly I didn't have a couple of tracks on my computer for whatever reason, and Bandcamp wouldn't let me download my own files from the shop I have on there, so I had to pay a whole two dollars plus 40 cents in tax to buy my own music from myself! Those two dollars go straight back to me, but those 40 cents are a terrible cost I bet the game will never earn back! What a tragedy!!

The OST contains 78 tracks totalling almost 4 hours. That's a lot! It includes the 8 Piano Collections pieces I wrote for Chapter 1's music. It's a shame I never did more for tracks people might be more interested in... though I did include an additional one for Emela's Theme which I apparently had lying around. I'll include the piano sheet music for those Piano Collections tracks as pdfs too.

I've also looked through the document of old planning notes that I have. It's 81 pages long, and it includes descriptions for all of the planned protagonists (accompanied by inept drawings of (most of) their faces), and descriptions for all the chapters I actually planned. Interestingly, the descriptions for the second and third chapters seem to have been written before I actually finished those, so there are some surprising differences.

I've also written some commentary (in a different colour and font), to show what I think of things looking back on it now, and to explain things I neglected to explain in the document itself. Reading through the long document and adding this commentary took many hours! Hopefully it's something a handful of people will find interesting.

Now I need to upload the files to Steam, though I've noticed when doing it that Steam now has the option to mark DLC as a Soundtrack specifically rather than a generic DLC, which seemed to be the norm in the past (even as recent as December, when I released Sindrel Song's OST as DLC). It says this will store the files differently on the buyer's computer, that the package will be handled differently by the Steam store, and that it's irreversible. It also says people won't be required to buy the base game to buy a soundtrack. Since I need to include both the soundtrack music files and the pdfs (for both the old notes and the Piano Collections sheet music), I'm wondering whether to make it a soundtrack DLC or not...

Have you recently bought - or at least seen - a soundtrack download on Steam which seemed to work differently to a typical DLC? How do you access the files you get? Does it just open up a folder? Could I include pdfs in there without issue?

I'm also including the walkthrough as part of the base game, not the extras, though I've been wondering what the best way to access that would be for players. I was thinking maybe you could press a key (eg W) mid-game to summon or hide it, as needed, but it would be much easier to just include it in a folder which the player can open up somehow. Have you ever got a game on Steam which required you to open a folder to view additional files, and if so, how did that work?

We're almost there now! Just a little more, then I can set a release date and set the store page to Coming Soon. I'll post again when that happens.