Hey! ːcta_emo7ː
It's that time of year again, time to vote! Please cast your vote for us to be the 'Labor of Love' award winner! I know we are going up against the entire Steam Store and we don't really stand a chance, but I have to at least ask!
Last year when we were eligible in all categories, we were just a week or so into the beginning of the project and nothing had even really been started. It didn't even make sense to vote for but at this point in the game with 600+ versions in, I think we are getting a bit closer to the goals, but not quite all the way there yet. The game's UI works now, over 400 designs, built an inventory, leaderboard, statistics history and a collection screen, a mini-game and even the music player to embed music tracks into some items. We've come a long way from the era where the buttons in the UI did not line up for months.
I'm definitely going to keep piling on the content into the app so it just gets more and more feature-rich as we go on. At first, I was having so much fun making songs and posting videos, but the app was a broken mess, so I stopped doing that not long after we started so I could focus on making the app good (and keeping up with the daily items). Now with the recent advances in image generation, it saves me a ton of time when getting the items ready now. At first it used to take me all day to make something that was hard to comprehend and now it can basically instantly create exactly what I can imagine, to the point where I was able to gain enough progress to knock off a lot of those features I mentioned.
What I regret was not making more songs. I feel like it is more important to create a few new minigames and make the app more complete, but we sort of missed a bit of an opportunity in AI music generation. With Universal Music suing Udio and shutting them down to create a new platform, and Warner Music doing the same thing to Suno yesterday, it may be basically impossible to create AI music as we once knew it. There will be new products coming in the future, so we'll see what comes down the pipeline but I wish I had a bigger of a catalog at this moment (of actual good tracks).
Udio/UMG are creating a new type of product we have not yet seen, it says specifically in the announcement post that they are going to be building a new platform which is going to be trained and licensed on UMG's vast existing catalog of releases. So even though they destroyed all the masters to your favorite music in the Universal Studios fire of 2008, they are going to use AI to make new music from their estates. Great. And now with Warner Music and Suno partnering up, we can assume they are going to do the same thing over there. If you thought AI music was weird or tacky now, it's probably going to get a lot weirder and a lot tackier.
So yea I wish we had a bit deeper of a music catalog but maybe it will be like the advances in image generation where it becomes far easier and better, technology is moving forward very quickly. We'll see what the future holds! Let me know if you have any feature suggestions for the game and please cast your vote for us in the Steam Awards for the 'Labor of Love' award! I'll try to whip up another Vote 4 JAMs song like last year. ːbgt_coolː