Written by on in Business.
American Thanksgiving and Black Friday are upon us. It can be a little difficult to figure out what's on sale where, so we're providing a per-storefront summary. All our video games come with Steam keys, even if if you aren't purchasing directly on Steam, and all discounts ...
Written by on in Business.
"(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors" has been out three months today! We're happy to announce that as of today, the game will be available on desktop platforms for $1.99 and mobile platforms for $0.99. This is the game's new normal price, not ...
Written by on in Business, Retrospective.
At the end of February we released "(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors" Remastered. Now that the furor and stress of the release week is behind us, we can look back at how it went.
We've been generally very pleased with the critical and fan response ...
Written by on in Business.
As we move forward in finishing our next project, we've decided to change its name to match how it's serving best in playtesting: Rosette Dramatic LARP is now Rosette Diceless!
Rosette Diceless is a roleplaying system that focuses on collaborative storytelling and consent-based conflict resolution. You can roleplay everything from complex combat to intricate political debate with the same set of simple, quick-playing rules.
There are two big reasons: the realities of the system, and marketing.
...Written by on in Business.
I've been a judge for the Independent Games Festival for at least six years. It's been an amazing time to have free access to the best works in independent gaming. The IGF has evolved a bit during that time; the grand prize winner in 2011 was Minecraft. The 2016 winner was Quadrilateral Cowboy. The vast majority of my time as an IGF judge has been in a post-Minecraft world, where developers knew that there was the potential for their tiny one-person indie game to be bought by Microsoft.
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We've been heads down on remastering "(I Fell in Love with) The Majesty of Colors" the last few months (along with getting Rosette Dramatic LARP to a stopping point). We wrote about our realizations on project multitasking earlier this year, so we've tried to focus down as much as is reasonable.
That means that the in-flight game most left alone is Exploit: Zero Day, our cyberthriller puzzle game.
...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 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 ...
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 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.
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