Hi, everyone. Tim here with the latest updates, mostly reporting on music things related to Negotiations Have Failed!
Play our early demo build and give your thoughts and feedback
You can play a good chunk of the game by downloading it on Itch: NHF Demo Page There's a feedback form there that you can fill out to let us know what you like and would suggest for NHF, and you can also join our mailing list there. You can also leave feedback in our Steam community/news posts and itch comment section.
Short term goals
- Wrapping up arranging the end credits music. It's about 80% there.
- Making the demo's soundtrack available on YouTube, Spotify, and Bandcamp
- Seeing which ways I can make improvements to the gameplay based on collected demo feedback
Last week's progress
Soundtrack is complete*
*If I'm being honest, I'll likely going to be tinkering with the songs' smaller details until the day before release.
After a few evenings of multi-hour hyper focus sessions, I've completed the end credits music, which I saved as the last track to fully write and arrange in FamiStudio. Looking through my phone's voice memos shows that the first time the song's idea visited me was in December of 2022, although I didn't finalize its structure (its melody and chords) until December of 2024.
A few of my friends who have provided me feedback on the game, some of them having beaten the entire game experience from start to finish, have been asking me for a while to upload the game's songs somewhere so they could listen whenever they want.
"I'm not going to upload it anywhere until all the songs are done!"
Since my friends have patiently waited, the first thing I did the day after I finished the last song was ready and upload an unlisted YouTube video of the complete soundtrack, with a visualization of FamiStudio's oscilloscope and the tracker that shows the different instrument notes.
The tasks that ended up eating time when preparing this video were completing the track order, figuring out a fix/melody change for a section of the Endless Patrol music that never sat well with me, and then coming up with "endings" of songs once the loop point comes to a conclusion, as opposed to fading out at the start of the second repetition like most game soundtracks do. I'm debating whether or not I want to take this approach with the final version of the soundtrack on streaming services. After listening a few times, I currently feel that some songs probably would sound better with a traditional fadeout.
More soundtrack details
I'm going to make an abbreviated version of the soundtrack, the demo soundtrack, available on YouTube with a similar visualization, probably with songs' names displayed, too. After those are available, I'll work on making the demo OST available on the other noted platforms.
The demo soundtrack will be 7 tracks, and then when the full game soundtrack is out, another 8 tracks will be made available. (The complete soundtrack is technically only 14 tracks, since one of the demo's tracks will be expanded into its "complete" version after release.) 13 of those songs are "full length" songs, and the short track is a quick mode ending jingle.
Importing the songs in the game and across streaming platforms will need some mixing work in the next weeks, as I usually mix the game's tracks into stereo in Audacity. The NES sound chip that FamiStudio is based off of didn't support stereo sound, and while I've have achieved a balanced mix for the songs in mono in FamiStudio, I value a stereo mix for these songs a little more. I like The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds stereo mix more than the mono mix, after all ;)