Shaking Hands with Shaking Hands

Shaking Hands with Shaking Hands

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It’s a punny title isn’t it? One you might see in the Ace Attorney games. But let me elaborate a bit on what I actually mean by this – I am shaking hands with someone with my hands that are shaking… Virtually, I suppose.

Usually I like to do these blogposts on a bi-weekly basis, but I am in the mood currently.

But anyway, let me tell you about the first time I make contact with content creators. That means, the composers. This occurs around January this year. Contact with the artists came about a month later than that so I will talk about it some other time.

Point of No Return

This is the point of no return. As soon as the send button is pressed, there is no going back.

When I first started commissioning things, as much as I know about which composers I want in the game – I don’t know how the market works. This is something you have to learn by jumping on it yourself. No books will truly teach you how to do it.

One reason I wrote the Commission Guidelines is to hopefully be a reference for both the supply (content creators) and the demand (rhythm game developers). Now that you know the types of licenses

I wrote the emails very nervously, in my mind it was “Oh God this is really happening. Things won’t ever be the same again”. But it was now or never. I contemplated between going full-time on this project for quite some time, and it was time to see through it.

Looking back on it, I would say there were a few red flags in my emails:

  • I was still using a @gmail.com account. I think this looks cheap when you are doing business as a commercial entity. Eventually I purchased this domain (wizdreamgames.com) and changed my email accordingly.
  • I didn’t include details about the game, especially a gameplay video
  • When I talked to composers that may not understand English I didn’t translate it… Not even through DeepL. I think this is a bit poor from me.

Scam?

If anyone believes it may be a scam then I would accept it. And in one such email that went to ZxNX, I didn’t even change the email title from its template.

This is legitimately the title of the email I sent to him.

This one is… quite embarrassing to look again, haha. Thankfully, he didn’t mind about it and as you can see, we have his songs on the game. The initial contact was not about Spy-DR, however. But you may know about it soon enough.

When the replies came back, it sent chills down my spine. My adrenaline is pumping. I was really excited that finally, things are really in motion. By now, I am more used to it but nonetheless every composer (and other content creators) that reply back to me still brings me the same excitement.

So yeah, I am really thankful for the ones that reply back to me even despite all the hiccups in my emails!

Then, moving on to another update we made last week…

Dysautonomia

Art by clishee

Just last week, we revealed Dysautonomia by XinG! Here is the gameplay + animation video again in case you missed it:

This time, both the animation and gameplay are in the same video. I think there may be cases where one of them might be seen, but not the other.

The chart was initially made as a lv12, but it ended up having 992 notes so I made it just a little bit harder to cement it as a lv13. The song length plays its part along with the mines, but overall I think it’s among the easier 13s in the game. I will look forward to you trying it when the time comes!

I think we can still improve on the song animation and the chart – the former especially as we just changed our animation framework.

Also a bit about its story significance – By itself, the artworks don’t tell much, even though the phrase “A picture tells a thousand words” exist. Connecting the dots – through other songs’ artworks and the implemented story itself is where things will finally make sense.

But hmm what if I remove the door…

Other Updates

Just some short ones in bullet points this time, since this post is quite long already:

  • Our Discord is now on 60 members! A small milestone to reach, but baby steps!
  • Our English Twitter account is closing on a little milestone too – get it to 200 followers!
  • Unfortunately, work on story may be postponed even further as we prepare even more infrastructural work. But we are already halfway through said infrastructural work so I hope the extra delay doesn’t take too long.

That’s about it for now. Look forward to the next updates 🙂