It’s been an amazing few days for Stranger than Fiction. First a feature on FreeIndieGam.es, then on IndieGames.com, then it was hosted and reviewed on jayisgames.com(I really like the attatched review), and finally it is featured on GameJolt!

It would be impossible to say which of the above is the most exciting. It’s just fantastic to see something with a little(or a large(a massive, in fact)) bit of yourself in it take off like this.

If we’re being completely honest, I had a lot of apprehensions making this game. Think Outside the Box was by far the most popular game(in fact, the only game with any real reception at all) I’d ever made; it’d been on FreeIndieGam.es, featured on GameJolt, included in a Rock Paper Shotgun article, and even had a Chinese Let’s Play done with over 20,000 views(Chinese video sites are awesome).

And now, I was going to follow that up with a game that had no humour, was much simpler on the surface and was relying entirely on my writing abilities(which I have very little faith in) to keep it together. I knew I had a great idea, and I loved it, but I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn’t be able to write it clearly enough, and people wouldn’t get it, and it would all fall flat. Still, I was never really tempted to try and make something I was more “confident” in. I knew I had to make this, I just had no idea how it would turn out. It was so radically different from what I had just released, and I didn’t know what would happen.

When I had finished it though, I was feeling a little more confident. I finally released it, and there were people who “got” it, and really enjoyed it, and that made me so relieved and excited. Everything since then has been unbelievably good icing on the cake.

Downloads per day. Ignore the last day, obviously.

Thank you to everybody who’s played the game, rated the game, commented, shared it on their sites. Especially big thanks to Phack/indiegamehunt who first asked for Think Outside the Box to be featured, and then went on to provide crucial help for this game in spreading and in also being featured on GameJolt(indiegamehunt is a great guy and a fantastic game journalist. Check his blog out!), to McFunkypants for starting the One Game a Month initiative without which I’d probably still be working on Think Outside the Box(or not working on anything at all), and to CROS for actually featuring both these games on GameJolt! Everyone is fantastic. Everyone. Ever.

Also, I really love GameJolt as a site. I haven’t made much contact with the community here yet, which I will definitely fix in the future, but everyone here is very welcoming and enthusiastic about indie games, and the site is very well designed. This will be my base of operations for the foreseeable future.

As for the future, I have a new game in the works(oOoOoOo)! I plan to have it out by the end of this month, and I even hope to enter it in the HTML5 competition going on over at clay.io! If it’s not ready in time, though, I’m fully committed to making this idea happen and this game will be released. Where I was worried for Stranger than Fiction, I am very excited for this game, time permitting. Watch out for updates! Maybe you’ll want to keep posted by following me on Twitter?

For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, you(yes, you!) can play Stranger than Fiction online now on GameJolt. Thank you all so so much!

(Sorry for all the parentheses, by the way!)