[h1]Throw Me in the River launched 1 year ago![/h1] [h2]For the next 10 days, enjoy a deep sale on Throw Me in the River. Own the game forever for an incredibly low price![/h2] [h2]A personal note from director / writer Reis Mahnic:[/h2] To those who purchased and/or Kickstarted the game, thank you all so much for your support. It really means the world to me and to the team that you checked the game out, and if you did, I hope you got something out of it. Maybe that something was personal to you, maybe that something was just a bizarre, short experience that you didn't totally click with but still stuck in your head. Regardless, I'm happy to hear that it affected you in some way. Throw Me in the River was an incredibly personal game to create. I first drafted the earliest version of River almost ten years ago, and it evolved significantly over the years; in 2015 I built a 15 minute long version of the game in Adventure Game Studio for a game jam. It differed significantly from this final version, but a lot of similar themes were found throughout. I built it shortly after my grandfather passed away. Before he did, on his deathbed, my family was discussing how he wanted the funeral to be handled. He responded, 'Funeral? What funeral? When I go, wrap me in a blanket and throw me in the river!', and I found the game's title. When I was growing up in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, my friends and I would explore abandoned buildings, and that informed the sequence at the end of the scene set in the 50s; Nic Freeman, Throw Me in the River's artist, worked off of photos of one such building I still had that were pulled from my old flip phone from the mid 2000s for reference. This game meant a lot to me to be able to make, but I also hope that you were able to bring some of your own life into the characters and events as you played the game. All told we worked on Throw Me in the River for about two years. This likely seems like a long time to work on a short visual novel like this, but the primary difficulty was in funding the game. I worked a day job and provided what I could to the project, and we funded the first half of the game entirely out of pocket. We funded the second half of the project using Kickstarter. Meetings with publishers did not go well; publishers simply were not interested in a slow paced story of the life of some random guy in Canada. All told the project cost just under three thousand dollars; a remarkably low sum of money for the development of a video game, but an enormous sum to us. This brings me to my final point: that's still an enormous sum of money to us. A lot of people have asked me over the last year what I've been working on. The truth is, while I have many stories lined up and ready to go, Throw Me in the River has not sold well over the last year. We do not have a way to get the game onto people's radars; it is expected that even as an indie developer and publisher you are ready and able to pay large sums of money to get booths at various shows to attract the attention of press, and even then it would be an uphill battle given the short length of the game. These are not struggles that are unique to our team. We're fighting the same fight everyone else is in indie development. But I want to make it clear that we do not know when we will be able to make another game as a result of this system everyone has to play by. So I haven't been able to start production on another game narrative, and instead have taken to just working on recent things in a purely written format as I cannot afford to pay for art and music, but I can still write. If you'd like to see us make another game, please share this game around. Let people know why it's unique! And let them know they can pick it up for next to nothing right now. We want to and are ready to work on another game, but until more people start checking this one out, that's just not going to realistically happen. Anyway, with that out of the way, permit me to ramble about the good things that happened in my life over the last year! Because there has been a lot of good. My wife and I, just today, celebrated our sixth year married and fifteenth (!) year together as a couple. I moved from Seattle back down to the Portland area. I've been working my way up the ladder in my day job, which has been very rewarding. I've been able to work on telling some wonderful stories, as I mentioned above, through my writing, which I can't wait to share in some form or another. My wife and I got a puppy, who has been a wonderful new daily part of my life. And I got to release a game that I had in my head for a decade. I'm incredibly proud of Throw Me in the River; I'm happy with the story I was able to tell, and even more happy with the work that Nic and Troy did to bring that story to life in a way I never thought I would see. Not a bad year at all. I hope you had a good year too. Forgive my rambling, but it seemed as good a time as any, and take care. -Reis