Due to unconfirmed reports of unpurchased IndieGameStand keys showing up on key reselling sites, we've revoked Steam keys which have not yet been redeemed from IndieGameStand and Desura, both sites that disappeared or changed hands without paying us money they owed.

Most people who bought the game should be totally ...

In a slow tale spanning the last four months, the IndieGameStand site (one of the places we sold Ossuary) closed parts down for maintenance, then went down completely for maintenance, and then its domain name stopped working entirely. Somewhere in there, its SSL certificate expired as well. The twitter account is silent and all of the preview images for their articles are broken, giving it the look of a column of blank gravestones.

2015 was a weird year. Somewhere in that year is a typical tale of an indie game studio underestimating project timelines and changing directions based on surprises and things they learned.

But I want to talk about budgets.

As indie devs, we leverage a variety of services to keep track of keys we've given out, press we contact or want to contact, vendors we've talked to, customers we've interacted with, and fellow developers/artists/etc. we follow.

Here's our list:

• Highrise: a free-for-small-setups Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) in which we store customer, press, and vendor contacts and email discussions. Highrise was originally developed by the makers of Basecamp and Campfire, and still has that clean UX.
• Promoter: a free-for-tiny-setups system to track press mentions of your games.
• presskit(): a free, self-hosted PHP tool to create a presskit for your company and its games — descriptions, screenshots, videos, press quotes, awards, etc.
• distribute(): a free, centrally-hosted tool that houses game keys and provides an interface through which press can request them. Requests are vetted to ensure they aren't from randos, and shows the reach/audience size of the folks requesting keys.

All four of these services can talk to each other, but it's not always the clearest to figure out how.

Hello! Gregory here. Almost a year ago we released our dark, funny, satirical game Ossuary. It's a story about descending into a static underworld, talking to the people there, and corrupting them with sins that are really virtues.

A year on, it's a good time to look back and talk about how the game was made and received. In short: those who played it seem to have really liked it and understood where it was coming from, but it hasn't had the exposure, popularity, or sales that we wanted from it.