Happy new year, friends! Welcome to 2020! Listen to this month's episode below or read the transcript online.

Listen to this month's episode below or read the transcript online.

Note: This episode was recorded on April 12, 2019. Some things have changed, like the fact that we've finished "The Plague." (Blame the NHL playoffs for why Melissa took forever to edit this. :-D)

This episode ...

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 ...

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?

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.

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.

In the third quarter of this year, we committed ourselves to diversifying Future Proof's income. Our only real source of income right now is sales of Ossuary, and while Exploit: Zero Day is trucking towards having salable plot, development on that has barely begun.

We had another idea, though: in the process of prototyping the Car Game, we started developing a simple scene loading tool in Unity. (Think of the sort of code that loads upcoming areas in an open-world game as you approach the edge of the current one.) This would let us dip a toe into dev tools (an altogether different market than game sales) and wouldn't have required much in the way of PR work: its discoverability would primarily be managed within the Unity asset store.

"All it needs," we said, "is a little bit of polish and some error checking. A couple weeks of work at most."

Famous last words from developers.

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.

At a local game developer's meetup this week, we were asked to talk a little about our approach to making money. Some people in the group are hobbyists, some want to go full time, and some already are. They're an eclectic and often very technical group. The slides from our talk are over on Speaker Deck or below.

For a long time, we planned for Exploit: Zero Day, our social hacking puzzle game currently in closed alpha, to use a "free-to-play" or "freemium" approach to money. Not anymore.