Fate is challenging us in unsuspected ways

Cover: Photo by Jussara Paulo on Unsplash

Our first Itch.io game is finally available for everyone. Epigoni: Essential distills two traditionally published manuals, and we wanted to create a more usable and simpler version that is free for everyone while keeping all the essential content —hence the name.

When you write a game about Fate trying to forcefully shape your future and what you are, and your name as a collective is Oddplan, you should expect a bump in the road, right?

Well, yes. Maybe a little too much.

Having a solid product resolves half of the problem.

We now had our PDFs well in advance of the release date. All set, then?

No. In our philosophy, the only thing that matters is that the game is played. The rest is background noise, vanity, and dreams of glory. How do you get it played when you are a new label competing for the player's attention with, well, THE ENTIRE WORLD?

Honestly, it took more work to get together to talk about the release strategy and to decide on the distribution and communication channels and the tone and voice of the brand than it was to write the game. Okay, maybe that's a bit of hyperbole, but still.

When you have a game in front of you that you've invested so much energy in, you feel responsible for giving it the best possible future. If only it were easy.

Marketing with no money is a stillicide of minor failures.

Finally, we had our files. We were ecstatic: our first Oddplan project could finally be handed to the players! Well, there's always that tiny detail: they should find you.

When you start a project from scratch, making yourself known requires money or time. We had one month and zero marketing budget.

Also, because this is something we do for passion, the bills are paid by classic 9-5 jobs, and there is no time to post on subreddits or network all the time on TTRPG forums. We had to use the few daily hours available to prepare a decent presentation on social platforms and set up all our digital properties, including the itch.io store.

With few hours and no money in our marketing effort, every public talk, demo, post, and pitch to the press must hit the mark every time. Clearly, it can't be that way.

You once got the publishing time wrong for a post, you wrote to the wrong contact, or the demo was a disaster for reasons beyond the game quality or the GM's skills. This stuff happens to everyone, even the biggest name in the industry; it's normal.

With lots of time or a substantial financial budget, these are classic teachable moments. When you have a month to go online with your game, they are just failures.

Don't get us wrong; we made peace with it, but knowing that we would have been in a far better place with a couple of thousands of dollars (or a Hyperbolic Time Chamber) is frustrating.

Still, we have a pretty Instagram account, and we even successfully opened a Substack with dozens of subscribers through simple word-of-mouth.

Despite some marketing setbacks, we were ready to send all our readers and followers to itch.io to download the game, but Fate showed us the middle finger again.

We're quarantined. Not Cool.

Friday night, we posted the Epigoni: Essential page on Itch.io to be ready to be shared at a live event for Free RPG Day in Italy. The official release was scheduled around 10:00 am ET, but the first contact between the public and our game was at 09:00 CEST (03:00 am ET).

Our man on the ground writes to us, alarmed, at 10:00 am CEST.

"Guys, when people open the download page, a nasty message comes up."

We were petrified. We had scheduled press releases, social media posts, and written content for major TTRPGs groups and forums with links to itch.io at the center. We had six hours to think of an alternative plan and hoped to stick the landing.

We wrote to the dozens of news outlets we had sent press releases to, blocked the posts, replaced the itch.io link with one to our Substack, and postponed much of the communication, which was designed to take advantage of Free RPG Day, until later.

We... well, we did it. The launch was smooth, at least as smooth as it could be, and people downloaded our game despite doing it from a crummy Drive folder after jumping through hoops.

Despite the mild success of the launch, we are still upset about the quarantine. On the one hand, that's on us; we should have published the game a week in advance to give the itch.io team enough time to check our files and ask us questions. The real-time launch is a terrific concept, but it was our first project on the platform with a new account, and we should have known better.

On the other hand, nobody told us anything about the quarantine. We were lucky enough to have people checking the download page before the official launch, or we risked all our credibility from the get-go.

I understand that the platform's primary concern is protecting its users. Still, we would like to be at least alerted before ruining months of work for a false positive (because it *is* a false positive).

Undoubtedly, Itch.io is a haven for indie publishers, but the platform is still videogame-centered in its approach and philosophy. Half the tools, services, and resources don't make sense for a physical product. We can't have our first plain old PDF product flagged as a possible scam, as if it were a .exe for a fake game maliciously distributed on Discord. It's not cool. At all.

We hope the product page will be released from the itch.io jail in the following days. We have many new free products to share with you all, and we would be upset if we had to search for an alternative.

No one expected that.

It's our payoff and also our curse. At least our writing hobby is as exciting as playing a game! See you soon, and drop us a line if you want to share your Fate-related shenanigans!