Happy Birthday to you, Grims!
Creative Director Leene here and I just wanted to let you know that, today, 5 years ago, we released Death and Taxes and this calls for a moment of celebration! And to share some fun DnT stuff you might have missed plus a surprise in the end of the post.... wow, 5 years has gone quick!
Let's go over the things that have happened!
Well firstly, after 3 years of work, we released Death and Taxes in February 20th 2020. We did that with 0 budget, struggling team with revenue share and most people working on it part time on the side of their jobs. So completely bootstrapped and self published!
If you are interested in seeing an Indie Developer documentary and want to see how our release week went and a bit behind the scenes, you can take look at this free documentary about a game dev co-living place in Sweden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4oBSm3QJk4
After that, in October we released a big Halloween update and called the game complete as everything we wanted to add was in there. Adding Cerris bar and plenty of characters to chat to. Including some voice acting by Stupendium who made a really good song about the game, go check out "Rest Employed" on youtube, if you haven't yet!
Now over the years we have localized the game in multiple languages and stores, including all the consoles and even a mobile version of the game! We partnered up with Pineapple works to help port it and Hawthorn Games to bring it to the Chinese market as well!
The game has sold over half a million copies on Steam, a bunch of copies on other consoles and we have been part of donation events where we gave away hundreds of thousands of copies for charity so I would say the game is owned by around a million people by now!
I love reading all of your your experiences and comments about the game, good or bad and I am glad the game has meant as much for some people as it has for me! There has been so much fan art and it's quality has blown me away, sometimes it is better than the art in the game. The most wild thing we saw was this 100 page Fan zine collecting art and fan stories that was made for our 2 year anniversary! You can download the free PDF here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HnT7_E8jzm_iCWuwwDvIpRt7I9eNi1LK/view?usp=sharing
Also in 2022, to thank all the fans for their art, I made this free downloadable adult coloring/activity book of the art of Death and Taxes that you can get here:
http://media.voog.com/0000/0044/9676/files/DnTColoringBook.pdf
Anyways, I don't want to keep this too long, but I wanted to thank everybody who has been part of this, either making the game, doing volunteer localization or just being there to support us as we have been making this game and our new games! You are always welcome to say hello to me and other devs at our Discord.
Currently, I have been really busy directing another game that comes out soon too... And about that...
...the surprise! If you love our skeleton pirate, Mortimer the Quartermaster, then you might be happy to hear that he will be back in our next game. More about it in our second post about CraftCraft: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1166290/view/501691675000701042
Take care! ❤︎
Leene