This month, we talk about the Rosette Diceless release and PR efforts, as well as the ongoing Exploit: Zero Day development and its Hackers-themed release structure.

Give a listen below or read the transcript online or as a PDF. You can also subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Stitcher ...

This past week was a dedicated time to show that we in the indie community #loveindies. All over Twitter and Facebook, folks were doing three things:

It was an absolute blast. We both gave things away from our own games, and recommended and reviewed games we love.

Our Giveaways

Our second podcast episode! We managed to keep to the format of about 15 minutes, which is tricky for talkers like us.

Give a listen below or read the transcript online or as a PDF. You can also subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, or ...

When we decided to go to the GDC this year, we knew we wanted to give out access codes to Exploit: Zero Day when we spoke to people. The easiest way to give out a code to EZD is with a link that includes the code and will guide the player to register, then apply the code.

I set out to create labels containing both a QR code and a shortlink that could be affixed to the back of our business cards. It took quite a bit of trial and error to make this process smooth, but a combination of a Google Spreadsheet, Excel, and Microsoft Word 2013/365 got the job done. Unfortunately, this process won't work with Word 2007 or 2010.

All this work is worth it, though, to have the back of my business card look like this:

Join me on this sweet and technical ride of mail merging.

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.

We're not sure how Ossuary got Greenlit.

On April 8, we posted a blog entry marking the one-year anniversary of our creepy-funny game Ossuary's journey on the Steam Greenlight service. On April 13, the game was approved, letting us start preparing it for release on Valve's major online ...

Our creepy-funny adventure Ossuary has now been in the Steam Greenlight program for a year. It's frustrating and demoralizing, and we're sharing some details about our experience. Whether you are in Greenlight right now, are considering it, or just buy games on Steam, it's good to know what the process is like.

One year in, and we're 84% of the way to the top 100.

Images in this article are taken directly from Greenlight's stats page for Ossuary.

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.