Written by on in Business.
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.
...Written by on in Development.
If you've played Ossuary, you might have noticed the scrolling text on the bottom of the menu screen notifying you of updates, sales, and sometimes new releases. This is our little Update system.
...Written by on in Development.
We've written that after the copyediting process of Rosette Dramatic LARP, we'd start typesetting using a document processing system called ConTeXt.
What is typesetting and why are we using something other than Google Docs or Microsoft Word to do it?
...Written by on in Business.
We're releasing Rosette LARP on a variety of marketplaces:
But why those stores?
We've never released a full roleplaying sourcebook before, although "Awaiting the End" (a one-page, single-session tabletop RPG) is freely ...
Written by on in Development.
We just finished working through the initial large set of edits on Rosette LARP, and wow, it was an intense process—it took about 18 person-hours to work through. Our copyeditor ("B") was delightfully methodical and caught some interesting things.
B noted several places where the meaning of ...
Written by on in Business.
One of the things that's struck us over the last few years of being in indie game dev is how very few teams seem to be using rigorous methods for running their business. (Or, if they are, they aren't talking much about it.) We've attended some great talks at conferences by Finji and watched videos like Simon Roth's "Killing the 'Lucky Indie' myth: How to build a sustainable microstudio", but beyond that the most consistent opinion we've seen is "Make strategies based on data."
Problem is: where is that data?
...Written by on in Development.
We have about 12 different sites or parts of sites that could have outages and two of us to manage them. Some of these have been up for years, and some are newer. Some applications require special installation or debugging, and some must be on differently-configured servers.
When one of those goes down, we both need to know how to diagnose and fix it as soon as possible. So how do we manage that?
...Written by on in Business, Retrospective.
Our plan for the last few years has been to work on multiple projects at once. When Gregory worked full time on Future Proof projects, this kept them from feeling drained working on the same thing day in and day out. Now that we're both indefinitely part time, however, we're finding it near-impossible.
Our 2017 plans seemed reasonable. They were in line with what we've tried to do in the last couple of years, but incorporating the data from previous years: actual dev time for new Exploit: Zero Day story jobs, actual time needed for marketing, conference schedules, etc.
With that in mind, we set ourselves up to work on two high intensity projects and a low-key one: EZD, Majesty of Colors, and Rosette LARP, respectively.
...Written by on in News.
We're very pleased to announce that we will be publishing a rule book for live-action role playing (LARP) based on the Rosette rules and philosophy! Rosette LARP will be available digitally and in print from DriveThruRPG and digital-only from itch.io by summer.
...
"Headless Swarm" (the first paid story for Exploit: Zero Day) now has the fourth hacking job in the season, "Internet All the Things." In this job, find out what the two antagonists are up to by hacking someone's house.
We've also published two side jobs that you might get access to as you aggravate or placate the two parties. These jobs don't have puzzles, but provide insight into a few of the characters in the EZD saga. Those were really fun to write! One is from an antagonist introduced in "Headless Swarm"; the other is Chamunda, a long-time EZD character that's a loyal employee of Samsara Digital with a low opinion of hackers.
...
