Let Them Trade News

Our composer Max went to a very unique event where a bunch of indie studios got together for the chance of recording a piece of their soundtrack with an orchestra.

Our composer Max and our developer Amadeus in the recording studios of the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg.

Usually, recording your game's soundtrack with a real orchestra is too expensive for a smaller indie studio like us to handle. That's why most composers and producers use sample libraries nowadays, where they get the sound of the real instruments recorded in multiple different variations and are then able to arrange them to their liking, all without the overhead of a real orchestra.

But having human musicians perform your music piece is still something different. The way they can articulate musical phrases, the many subtleties in their playing, the interaction between the different instrument groups and the special character of the room and the situation - that is something that is really hard to reproduce digitally. A piece recorded by a bunch of professionals will almost always sound better than one produced in your bedroom.



But how can a studio like Spaceflower afford to do this? This is where the guys over at AudioCreatures come in! They had the great idea to just book an orchestra for a whole day and then splitting this day up into multiple slots where different game studios could get the chance to have a piece of their game's soundtrack recorded. And that was the event "Live Score Berlin"

So our composer Max and our developer Amadeus headed over to Potsdam, to get our title track recorded by the "German Film Orchestra Babelsberg". They captured their thoughts and impressions in a series of videos which we cut together as some sort of mini-VLOG. Max also explains the challenges when you have to translate digitally produced music into music that's played by real people.

You can find the YouTube video below. We originally created the video with the intention of posting it on TikTok (which we also did), so desktop readers, please bring your monitors into an upright position before continuing on to watch the video!

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I think the track turned out great. What do you think, should we release the full track outside of the game as well?

Sincerely,
Spaceflower

Updates may have become a bit sparse, but we have not stopped working on Let Them Trade! We will try to keep you more updated from now on, but only time will tell if we can manage. :)

Anyway, here is a small recap of what has happened since the last update:



If you have seen our last announcement post, you will know that we made a trip to Gamescom! If you don't know, Gamescom is a large games exhibition happening each year in Cologne, Germany. If I'm not mistaken, it is the biggest gaming exhibition in the world.

Our developer Amadeus and our composer Max went there to represent Spaceflower and show Let Them Trade at the booth of ByteRockers' Games.

Their feedback: Manning the booth for several days was very exhausting, but at the same time it was very fun and exciting to get the game into the hands of the players. Thank you to everyone who came by and gave the game a try!





Inspired by the feedback we got at Gamescom, we started handing out the game to even more players. We started our first Community Playtest with our loyal Discord members who waited patiently for quite some time. The playtest is still ongoing, but we already got a lot of valuable feedback!

Between a lot of bugs and still poorly-balanced features, we got a lot of positive feedback for the game, which we are of course very happy about!

If you would like to take part in a future playtest, make sure to join our Discord! We will inform you there if it's time to do another one.

In the meantime, check out this huge and amazing map one of our playtesters made with our integrated map-editor:





You wouldn't believe it, we actually worked on the game as well!

Actually, that's where most of our time went and that's also why we haven't released a development-update in quite some time. Some things took some figuring out and many things were rebuilt. And while doing that, we most often keep to ourselves, but we are slowly figuring out that working closely with the community helps us figuring out whats best for the game a lot quicker.

We will tell you more in our coming entries of our dev-diary! So make sure to follow the game and keep an eye out for new posts here on Steam!

But for now, have some scribbles:


Sincerely,
Spaceflower

Hey everyone!

Our Team has been hard at work on Let Them Trade and we're happy to say we finally got some exciting news for you!

First off, as you probably have noticed in the Steam Page, we now have a dedicated Publisher with ByteRockers' Games! That means we will have people to support us with all the work that comes with shipping an indie game title and we can focus more on making our game the best it can be.

Secondly, the news you've been waiting for:
We will be back at Gamescom 2024 with a sparkling brand new demo for you to try! We've implemented a ton of new features and updates since our last gamescom, so if you're attending we're hoping you can stop by, play the game and grab some awesome goodies!

You can find us as part of the "Home of Indies" in Hall 10.2.

For all those who cannot attend, we will be preparing a more extensive demo before our launch and can't wait for you to finally play a newer version of the game.

In the meantime, feel free to check out our Steam page for some updated screenshots and of course our new Keyart!

Thank you for your continued support and hope to see some of you at gamescom!

Dear Steam community,

We are happy to share that our project is progressing well, and we are diligently working towards a public release of a playable version.

Our team has been putting in a lot of effort to refine the gameplay mechanics, create visually appealing graphics, and implement exciting features to deliver an engaging gaming experience.
These changes still need to be implemented, balanced, or optimized in some cases.

We appreciate the support and patience of our community thus far!
We will update you on our progress and post more details about the game soon.

The next placeholder had to go and was kicked out, this time it was the trader's.
We replaced the flying "somethings" with an actual model of how the traders are supposed to look in the game - a carriage with brave horsies in front of it.



They also rotate into the proper direction, so they'll see and be able to avoid any obstacles in their way.

Speaking of obstacles:



We also have a working pathfinding implementation now.
What is that and what does this mean, you ask?

It's the ability of the game to find a decent way from one hexagonal tile of the map to any other - including accounting for hard to pass terrain or not all passable fields.

Check out this example, where the game found a neat way from the left to the right end of this road while avoiding and "walking around" the impassable mountains:




So yah, all in all, we're coming along nicely,
stay tuned for more updates - and the closed Early Alpha soon!

-Your Spaceflower Team