Swan Song news & patch notes

Hey everyone,

We have got a lot of quality of life changes & some new levels for you! Down below you'll find a list with everything that has changed and added:

• Added 2 new secret levels.

• Made changes to the overall level selection, to make it clearer which levels are locked, unlocked and that you can select a level if you want.

• Secret levels you previously unlocked can now be played directly through the level selection.

• Added the options button to the level select menu.

• Added a secret level counter to the level select. This way you can see where you still need to unlock a secret level (only visible after finding all the necessary elements to start playing secret levels).

• Added the screwdriver to the toolbelt. This will be used to get into the level editor in the future, buy you can't interact with it yet.

PLEASE NOTE: If you have previously played all other secret levels and unlocked the achievement, the counters in each chapter will still showcase 0/1, 0/2,... This is because the data for these unlocks is new save data you don't have yet. If you launch a secret level by playing the correct melody, these counters will get filled in.

Level Editor Update

On launch we posted about the upcoming level editor feature! We are still hard at work getting that feature ready for you. Below you'll find a slightly updated look at where we are currently at. If you would like to help us test this feature, we will start to test it somewhere in August with our community on our community discord! Join here is you would like to help us test -> https://discord.com/invite/hyEhfENBQN In the level editor you will be able to make your own chapters & levels, and share them on the steam workshop. We will be adding new platforms, notes,... exclusive to the level editor after it's release as well! So stay tuned for a lot more content in the future!

That's it for now! We hope you all like these changes and have fun with solving the 2 new secret levels! Cheers, Sander, Jonathan & Beau of Business Goose Studios

• Changed the German translation for Tristan's final letter.
• Fixed chapter 1 secret level having a bypass by not using all notes.
• Increased speed of text appearing on screen (this was mainly an issue for the cassette of chapter 3).
• Fixed an issue where the text of some story objects went offscreen when playing on a widescreen monitor.
• Fixed an issue where the credits would sometimes stop to early on some aspect ratios.

• Notes sometimes become unclickable when being picked-up and put down to quickly.
• One user reported an issue where they got send back to the level select, but the kay and current level where still loaded, locking them out of the game.
• Some settings seem to be reset when relaunching the game.

Hi everyone,

We just wanted to say thank you to everyone for the great comments and for buying the game! Swan Song has now sold 1K units since launch. 🤩Thank you everyone! 🥰

And if you have bought the game but haven't left a review yet, leaving a review help us a lot! We try to read every single one of them. Here are 3 of our favorites so far:

But now, we wanted to host a week long AMA for anyone who isn't in the discord and had some questions for us about the game, the studio, or anything else (within limits of course 😅). So we are hosting this AMA untill this sunday! Thank you all again for the great response to Swan Song, and we hope you will all enjoy the level editor when it releases in the future! Cheers, Sander, Jonathan & Beau of Business Goose Studios

Hi everyone,

We are very pleased to say that Swan Song is finally released! 🤩 We are very excited for you all to get your hands on the full game, and we hope you will love the puzzles and the story of Amber, Tristan & Edith as much as we loved working on it. Launching with 14K+ wishlists has been our most wishlisted game so far, and we still can't believe we hit that number! We want to thank everyone for the continued support we got during development, though this is not the end of the line for Swan Song! 🥰

Please don't hesitate to send us a message in the community hub or our community discord if you find any bugs or have any additional feedback! But now, onto the other news!

Free Update Roadmap & The Level Editor

We will continue to support Swan Song with some additional updates these coming months. Down below you can check out the (currently very small) roadmap of free updates the game will receive.

Controller support and better Steam Deck support are pretty self explanatory. But now, about the more exciting part, the Level Editor!

With this level editor, you will be able to create your own Swan Song chapters and share them on the steam workshop. You will be able to chose from all the platforms, notes & obstacles that are in the main game, decorate the box with gears, and chose what environment & background music will play when people play your custom chapter.

We will also slowly add new platforms & notes to the level editor in more additional free updates. If you have any ideas for additional platforms, notes or obstacles, you can always send us a suggestion in our community discord! 😁 Down below you can check out a screenshot & video of the level editor in it's current state.

Please note that this feature is still a few months away however, since it's a pretty big undertaking to get everything in correct. The base functionality is there, since this is also the way we made levels for the main release. But there is still a lot of back-end stuff to do, many bugs to fix, polish to add,... but we will keep you all posted on the progress! 😁 That's it for now! Thanks again for all the support, and have fun with the release of Swan Song! 🥰 Cheers, Sander, Jonathan & Beau of Business Goose Studios

Hey everyone,

We just updated the current demo to better represent what the final release will feel like. Here is a full list of all the changes and additions:

• Added 8 additional languages.

• Made changes to some SFX.

• Added settings (audio, graphics & accessibility).

• Made some slight changes to some story objects.

• There is now a window that displays the text of the cassettes and other story objects. This is also the space where you will find the translations.

• A lot of polish has been added in this version!

• Fixed a bug that could lock you out of picking up additional story objects or prevented you from picking up the key again.

Like we said in the last post, we are currently finishing up the full version by adding in the achievements, some bug fixes, and some extras! 😁 We can't wait for you all to start playing the full game!

Cheers,

Sander, Jonathan & Beau of Business Goose Studios

Hey everyone,

We are very VERY happy to announce Swan Song has reached 11K wishlists! 🤩 Thank you all so much for wishlisting and playing the demo these past couple months! As we are nearing the full release (only 2 weeks left), we can tell you development is going well, and we are currently fixing the last few bugs, adding a ton of polish, and setting up a plan to support Swan Song post release. We will of course tell you more about these plans on launch day.

We couldn't have done it without our amazing VO team over seas in Nova Scotia, nor without the magical tunes of Jamal and our amazing community. We are very excited for you all to hear the complete soundtrack & experience the story in full!

We hope you are all just as excited as we are about releasing Swan Song, and we hope you will have a lot of fun fun (and feelings) when you finally get your hands on the full release.

Untill then! 🥰

Cheers and thank you, Sander, Jonathan & Beau of Business Goose Studios

Hey everyone!

We are very pleased to announce that Swan Song will release on June 4th 2026! 🥳 After 1,5 years of development, we are very close to the end now. Developing Swan Song has been a very fun journey, and we are actually not even finished with it after it's release. But before we give you some more behind the scenes stuff and talk about what to expect after release, we would love it if you gave the new trailer a watch by following the link down below! 🥰

Demo updates

Since we are part of the Galaxies showcase, we have taken the opportunity to update our demo a bit. Here is a full list of changes you can check out in the new demo right now:

• Saving!! Yes, we finally have saving in Swan Song. You can now continue where you left off in the demo, and choose any level you want to play, from the level select.

• Some SFX have been updated, like the ambient sounds of chapter 1.

• Each cassette at the start of the chapter now also includes a small scene you can listen too! These scenes will tell you more about Tristan, Amber & Edith and we really feel like they elevate the story! We are extremely grateful to the amazing team over in Nova Scotia, Canada for providing us with these scenes. Working with them has been amazing (even if it was remote & far away from our little Belgium), and we are very pleased with the end result! (at the bottom of this post you can find some behind the scenes screenshots of the recording sessions).

• The key can now only be removed by pressing the esc button. We noticed that the key being able to be dragged out confused a lot of players, so this should help with that!

What comes after release?

We have talked about this a few times, but for any new players/wishlists, we wanted to mention it again! 😁 After launch on June 4th, we will start working on the level editor. The idea of this level editor is that you can make your very own chapters, and share them with other Swan Song players on the steam workshop! We will probably host monthly events with a certain theme and will try to feature the best chapters of that month somewhere (on our discord, in-game,...). Down below you can see an older image of said level editor we use in-house right now. This feature WILL NOT be available on launch, but will be released some time after launch. An exact date and roadmap will be communicated later on!

Behind the scenes stuff!

And lastly, we wanted to share some more behind the scenes pictures of the recording sessions, as well as 3 new story objects you will encounter in Swan Song! But that's all! We want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has supported us during this 1,5 year journey, and we hope you will enjoy Swan Song as much as we enjoyed making it! 🥰 Cheers, Sander, Jonathan & Beau from Business Goose Studios

Hi everyone,

We just wanted to do a quick post about the Steam Next Fest! We just updated Swan Song with a new demo which fixes a lot of bugs, includes changes to the levels & updates some of the story & environment elements.

But before we get further into these changes & new screenshots, we wanted to ask everyone if you have played the demo previously to please leave a review on our demo page. Support like that will help us greatly during the Steam Next Fest, thank you!! 🥰🥰

Here is a quick list of most of these changes & fixes. We also address the question about saving some people talked about. 🦢🎶

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused notes to trigger twice when the music box was playing right at the end of one of the soundtracks.

• Fixed an issue with the music box staying shut when the swan failed a level.

Updates

• Made changes to levels in chapter 2 & 3.

• Added updated environments for chapter 0 - 3.

• Updated some of the story elements with Voice acting, and removed/changed the position of others.

• The Swan Song demo can now be played on MacOS!

Saving

We know there still isn't any saving. This feature will be in the final game though, so don't worry! You won't have to start over each time you launch the game, but you will be able to choose which level in what chapter you want to play (if you have previously played them) & will be able to continue your progress from a previous play session! 😁 Saving wasn't a big priority right now for us, since the demo is only 20 - 30min long right now and can be played in one short play session.

Some new screenshots from the full game

We also wanted to share some new screenshots with you from the full version of Swan Song, but didn't want to spoil too much! So here is one of the new environments you will get in one of the new chapters. As well as a new story object! Can anyone here guess which bands these logo's refer to? 👀

That's everything for now! We hope everyone enjoyed the demo and these new small screenshots we share. If you want to help us test the game even further, you can always join our community discord through the link below! We ofcourse put all our testers in the credits of the game as a way of saying thank you! 🥰

Join our discord here 👉 https://discord.com/invite/hyEhfENBQN

Cheers and have a great week,

Sander, Beau & Jonathan of Business Goose Studios

Hey everyone,

Production for Swan Song is in full swing! We have behind the scenes stuff to show you, as well as info about the 5 year anniversary giveaway at the end of this post! 🥳

Voice Acting 🎶

We recently started on the next parts of the voice acting parts for Swan Song with the wonderfull Emily Kolm (who also made our reveal trailer for Gamescom 2025) and Matt Harris. Below you can check out a small vlog and some behind the scenes footage of Rick recording the second letter!

There will be a lot more Voice Acting that will be added to the final release, but the 2 letters are currently the two things you can check it in the revisioned demo we will be releasing for Steam Next Fest.

The group of wonderful people helping us bring Swan Song to life!

Behind the scenes of Ricks recording session (apparently youtube shorts links don't work here) ->

Business Goose turns 5! 🥳

Business Goose Studios recently turned 5 years old! During this time we worked on tons of projects for amazing partners all over the world, and developed (and co-developed) 3 games, with Swan Song being the most recent one and releasing this year!

To celebrate, we are currently hosting a giveaway on our community discord. We are giving away 20 keys for Sizeable, as well as 5 keys for Swan Song when the game releases! Just follow the link below, accept the rules of the discord, and go over to the giveaways channel to see how you can enter! Winners will be chosen this friday 06/02 in the afternoon! 🤩 Join our community discord here -> https://discord.com/invite/hyEhfENBQN

Thanks for the continued support, and untill the next dev-log! 💾

Cheers,

Sander, Jonathan & Beau of Business Goose Studios

Hey everyone,

We just wanted to make a little post about the current stage of development and talk about our Gamescom 2025 experience!

Swan Song is now in Beta!

Yes! We have now officially entered the beta stage with Swan Song. That means we are currently hard at work making content (levels, new platform types, implementing the rest of the story,...) after getting all systems set up during alpha. Because of that, we have some screenshots to share with you all! These screenshots showcase the updated environments in the first 3 chapters and some new mechanics that are slowly getting introduced in the next couple chapters! Can you guess what all of the new mechanics are and what they do?

We will be sharing more stuff in the coming weeks/months now that the behind the scenes stuff is mostly done and we can truly show all the cool new puzzle things we are implementing!

Updated environments

Can you guess what each new mechanic does?

Gamescom 2025

In short we can tell you that our Gamescom 2025 experience was absolutely fantastic! It was wonderfull to get to talk to so many of you who where excited about the game, hear your feedback and get to see people's first hand experience with the game!

Although it were 5 very tiring days, we got a lot of valuable feedback from showcasing the game at the Indie Arena Booth! We are very very gratefull that we got the opportunity to showcase Swan Song there, and it defenitely motivated us even more to deliver the best possible version of the game to all of you next year.

We uploaded a little after movie a few months back, but now only got around to really post about it just now. We also got our first piece of fan art! Which was very exciting!! ♥♥

That's it for now! We want to thank you all again for wishlisting the game. checking it out during Gamescom 2025? Happy holidays from all of us here at Business Goose Studios! 🎄🦢

Cheers,

Sander, Beau & Jonathan

Hey everyone,

We just wanted to update everyone that the new demo is now live! This demo includes:

• 3 chapters + the tutorial chapter to play through. Note that these chapters have a reduced level count because it's just a demo! more levels will be available in the full version.

• The complete story up to chapter 3 (there will be 9 in the full game).

• 4 music tracks written by the fantastic Jamal green!

Please let us know if you do encounter any weird bugs or have any feedback in general! Do also let us know if you enjoyed the new demo! :D Cheers and thanks for all the support 💖,

Sander Ambroos & the Business Goose Team

Hi everyone,

We just wanted to post something to announce that we just released the reveal trailer for Swan Song! You can check it out by clicking the link below:

Like we previously said, we will be attending Gamescom 2025 at the Indie Arena Booth. We would love it if you could swing by to play the new demo and have a chat! We are located in Hall 10.2, Section 1, Booth 13.

Ofcourse, the new demo will also be playable during the steam event of Gamescom 2025. Make sure to tell people about the new demo and make sure they wishlist! 💖

Thanks for all the support, and see you at Gamescom!

Cheers,

Sander Ambroos & the Business Goose Team

Hi everyone,

We have been hard at work to get the vertical slice/new demo of Swan Song ready. Here are a couple things that we have done and are planned for this year.

New Demo

We have been hard at work to rebuild the whole game to make it more stable compared to the Gamejam demo version. The new demo that has been uploaded to steam now has the following features:

• New "shorter" tutorial.

• New levels & pacing in chapter 1.

• new levels & pacing in chapter 2.

• Environments change depending on what chapter you're playing.

• Added a lot of SFX & VFX.

• Added more player feedback.

• Updated a lot of models & textures.

• Lots of bug fixes (but do report any you find).

Work on the vertical slice continues

Like we said in the previous part, we have been hard at work to get the vertical slice of the game ready! This means the whole back end, internal level editor,... should be finished so we can start adding more levels & more story objects for the final version more easily. Here are some examples of story objects, new environments & the internal level editor. Some of these objects will be present in the final demo that will release during Gamescom 2025.

The environment will also change depending on what chapter you are playing. It serves the purpose to give the look of the game a bit more variety, but also to set the mood for the part of the story you are currently experiencing!

Gamescom 2025

And then, some big news! We will be attending Gamescom 2025 at the Indie Arena Booth. We will be presenting the full vertical slice of Swan Song there, so this means:

• Chapters 1 - 3 will be playable.

• The first part of the story will be present and playable.

• We will be doing some giveaways to win a copy of Sizeable OR a copy of Swan Song for the future!

• Some merch will also be given away when you drop by and have a chat with us, play the game and wishlist! :D

That's it for now! We hope you are as excited about Swan Song as we are, and that the new demo gives you a better look at how the game will feel in the final version/demo (tho the pacing and difficulty still needs some work). Make sure to join our discord if you would like to participate in the playtests we are currently hosting!

Cheers,

Sander Ambroos & the Business Goose Team

Story

Puzzle mechanics

New models & shader