Update 1.4.0: New Soundtrack and a Cautionary Tale for Ukrainian Game Devs

A new soundtrack

Version 1.4.0 replaces the music across the whole game. All three music styles you can pick in Options now play new tracks.

Time Pressure

An original theme commissioned for AE from composer Wazir. Pitch shifting works exactly as before, so the music tightens as your dig clock runs down.

Upbeat and Lyric

Both styles are built from new track sets, ten tracks for Upbeat and seven for Lyric, so the music you dig to is completely different in either mode.

You can switch styles at any time in Options, under Music Style.

P.S. A cautionary tale for fellow developers

Humble Bundle has been a great source of assets for us for years now. It is a great way to gather a nice collection for prototyping and jams, and to fill the less important asset roles in an actual game. I personally bought every asset bundle they offered, and Archeological Emergency, the original game jam prototype of AE, was built completely from those.

When we started preparing AE for its Steam release, we replaced the imaginary artifacts with real ones and commissioned art to depict them all. At some point we started building the Credits section and tracking down every author of every asset, and we hit our first landmine: the art we had for the tools, even though we had modified it, originated from a russian artist, and we cannot in our right mind ship russian assets in our game. That would be a sacrilege. Thanks to an amazing artist we had met on Fiverr before, that problem was solved by commissioning an original set of tools.

Since then we double check every new bundle, and every author featured in it, for their origin. It turns out almost every asset bundle Humble Bundle released in the last half a year was either completely russian or at least included some packs by russian artists. The most outrageous one featured one russian artist exclusively and advertised a children’s charity. People who murder kids, making money while hiding behind a children’s charity.

Recently they posted another bundle featuring the musician who made the tracks we used as our main game theme and alternative soundtracks. We had our suspicions about him before, but not enough to prove his russian citizenship. When that bundle rolled into our mailbox, we ran another round of checks and this time we found enough proof. So we had to scramble to source a new soundtrack weeks before release. Luckily the amazing Fiverr artists came to the rescue again, so our main theme is an original track and the alternative soundtracks are from another Humble Bundle creator, a reputable one.

So, fellow devs: keep your eyes wide open when buying anything from Humble Bundle. They have no limits on who can sell their stuff on their platform, even if they are murderers and terrorists.