Monthly Archives: October 2018

Happy Halloween! Get Where Shadows Slumber for Only $1.99!

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Today’s blog post will be brief, as I am headed out the door in a few moments for a three-week excursion to Australia. While I’m there, I’ll be showing off Where Shadows Slumber at Supanova Adelaide and Supanova Brisbane as Jack toils away in the Android mines back home here in Hoboken.

If you’re on our email list, you’ll get a more detailed roundup of all the Where Shadows Slumber news your heart can take in a few hours. But for now, feast your eyes on two glorious pieces of news: our awesome Halloween trailer and our awesome Halloween sale!

 

Our Game Is Just $1.99 For Halloween!

Check out the trailer above! We didn’t just do it because we love Halloween – it’s because Where Shadows Slumber is available at a special price for just a few more days. If you purchase the game on the App Store before Halloween ends, you’ll save $3! After Halloween, the game returns to its original price of $4.99. It’s a steal! (But not a trick) So grab it while you can…

(You can watch the trailer on YouTube here)

 

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We’re Coming to Android November 20th

After the darkness of Halloween, comes the light of the sun – our game is coming to Android toward the end of November! There’s a more formal announcement to follow at the end of the week, but as a reward for reading our blog, we thought we’d let you all know first.

Mark your Calendars, charge your Androids, and throw your Kindles out the window (kidding, kidding) because Where Shadows Slumber launches on Google Play on November 20th!

Don’t forget to try the free beta on your device first to make sure the game runs smoothly. Over 25 people have responded to our survey, and currently 3,500 people are “in the program” on Google Play. We’re capped at 5,000, so get in there while you can! It fills up a bit more each day, so I can’t guarantee your spot. Thanks to those of you who have already helped us crush some Android bugs!

 

 

Upvote Us On Reddit!

We’re enlisting you, the blog army, in one small task… please go to the posts linked below on Reddit and upvote them! It only takes a second, but it will keep our post on the front page of these respective pages and allow people to see our game.

/r/MobileGames
https://www.reddit.com/…/where_shadows_slumber_halloween_s…/

/r/IndieDev
https://www.reddit.com/…/9shv2m/we_made_a_halloween_trailer/

/r/Unity3D
https://www.reddit.com/…/after_35_years_where_shadows_slum…/

/r/MobileGaming
https://www.reddit.com/…/ios_where_shadows_slumber_hallowe…/

Some jerks actually downvoted us! Can you believe that? Why… why? I don’t even know. Counteract their negativity with your positivity! Upvote us for great justice!

 

OK, that’s all for now – gotta jet! Literally I have to get on a jet plane and fly across the planet. Share the game with your friends while I’m at 30,000 feet! Stay tuned for updates about the trip…

 

 

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Where Shadows Slumber is now available on the App Store! bit.ly/WSS-iOS

Find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.

Trick or Treat, Scammers!

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It’s that time of year again – the leaves are changing, the air is getting colder, and everyone is getting their costumes ready for Halloween!

But mischief is also in the air…

We’ve been enjoying watching Where Shadows Slumber take off on the App Store since we launched last month. However, not everyone is happy for our success. Some people have tried to scam us out of our hard-earned game by trying to get free promo codes even though they aren’t journalists, YouTubers, streamers, or influencers.

Apple doesn’t want us giving these codes out to regular customers! That’s why you only get 100 at a time. They even give you a massive contract that lays out what the codes are for, specifically so you don’t fall for people’s stories. And while I understand we’ll never be able to do anything about software piracy, there’s no reason I need to fall for cheap tricks…

So in the spirit of Halloween, here’s two ridiculous stories of would-be scammers attempting to pull one over on yours truly. Share this funny article with your friends, even if they’ve never heard of Where Shadows Slumber! I think anyone who works in customer service will find this hilarious.

operation_open_heart_281071147227529

Scammer #1 – The $8.00 Heart Operation

Our first scam attempt comes from Salama Youssef, who emailed us at contact@GameRevenant.com with this touching copy/pasted tale:

Oct 8, 2018, 6:15 PM

Hello,

I always have an appreciation for Where Shadows Slumber application….

You can offer me a promo code for (Where Shadows Slumber for iphone) application because currently i have lost all my money on the Health of my family (my father suffered a heart operation that cost more than 8.0639 US Dollar (USD) so I am forced to tell your team that my situation finaciere can not allow me and my family pay the rent)

Sorry for the trouble I have caused for you, but, sincerely, I will be very happy if you discharge me from this sum.

God Bless You

Even if we believe this sob story about an $8.00 heart operation, can someone explain to me why this man needs a free copy of Where Shadows Slumber? As far as I’m aware, we don’t offer any of Apple’s new live-saving wearable functionality. It’s a puzzle game! Come on, dude. Also, the Google Translated English is a nice touch.

I didn’t even reply to this email, and he never followed up. It’s probably just an auto-generated email. Good for a chuckle, but time to move on.

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Scammer #2 – My Daughter Ate My Homework

Our next scam took much longer, because this person kept pestering me. Say what you will about Mr. Youssef, but he knew when to find a new mark. But “Zahid Aslan / The Sunflower” just wouldn’t leave me alone, so I had some fun with him. Here’s the initial scam email:

Sat, Oct 6, 4:16 PM

Hi! I’ve purchased Where Shadows Slumber in iOS and was adoring it, but it seems like my daughter accidentally deleted it and when I was planning to reinstall, the appstore didn’t allow me to redownload the game for free for some reason. (No idea why, nothing I did to fix it worked, I even contacted Apple but they weren’t much help) so I was wondering if it’s okay if you can send a redeem code so I can reinstall the game? Thanks! Great game and worth $5!

Sent from my iPad

Not bad. I’ll be honest, this seemed real at first. A+ on this first email. He complimented the game, blamed two other people (his daughter, and Apple) and made it seem like contacting me was a last resort. He even put in the “sent from my iPad” bit at the end. Is this a pro Genji?

I had to dig a little deeper though, because I know how the App Store works. The error he’s talking about is impossible – you can’t “delete” something from your library of purchased iOS apps. So I replied immediately, and nicely asked him for some proof.

Wow I’m sorry to hear that! That’s very strange – it should be tied to your App Store account forever once you purchase it. We used all of our promo codes already, but I can try to see what the problem is.

Do you have the receipt in your email from when you bought it? Send me a screenshot of it and I’ll see how I can direct you. Unless you requested a refund, they should have it in your library permanently from now on.

Apple is pretty strict about refunds, so they’re keeping your money unfortunately [ x_x] but I’ll see what I can do!

-Frank

We hadn’t actually used all of our promo codes… that was just a little lie to get him talking. Then, he blew his cover with one of the worst things you can ever do: fake graphics. Read on…

Yeah it’s strange, I think this is the first time I’ve experienced it, Apple actually told me this

SunflowerScam

But Apple does provide more codes after each update I think, so I guess I will wait for that, since the refunding system for me is a mess and I don’t want to risk it.

Thanks anyway!
Sent from my iPad

Oh, Zahid. You flew too close to the sun, my friend. This is clearly a conversation he had with himself or a friend over Twitter DMs, with their names cropped out. Two dead giveaways here:

  • How could there be a “new bug” with iOS 11 a few weeks after iOS 12 launched?
  • Apple never tells customers to ask developers for promo codes.

Besides, he followed Game Revenant’s Twitter account with his own “Sunflower” Twitter account a few days earlier. When I noticed the similarities between the avatars, I did some snooping and found this:

Scam-Tweet

He must be some kind of weird man that emails developers for keys, and then hands them out on Twitter to boost his popularity. Not today, kid.

Here’s where I stopped responding. His game was up. I knew he was lying to me, and I didn’t have to call him on it. I planned to just ignore him.

But he wouldn’t stop.

If At First You Don’t Zahid…

As it turns out, we actually did update the game around October 7th for unrelated reasons. He apparently caught wind of this. Two days after the first email, he’s back in my Inbox:

Mon, Oct 8, 6:25 PM

Hi, I’ve seen you updated the game a day ago. Do you have a code now? Apple usually refreshes them after each update.

Sent from my iPad

I couldn’t believe he was still trying this! But I didn’t reply. Surely he’d go away, right?

Wrong!

Oct 9, 2018, 12:10 PM

Hello?

Not cool, man. You don’t get to flood my Inbox with annoying messages when you’re trying to scam me. And where’s the “Sent from my iPad” signature? Sloppy. That’s when I decided it was time for an early Halloween trick.

Apple promo codes are 12 digits long, and highly specific. All I had to do was create some random ones and make sure I didn’t accidentally give him real codes.

Sorry Zahid, I took off for Columbus Day! Here’s two codes, one for you and one for your daughter:
U1R7MR99G4Y0
G3TR3KT7N3RD
Have fun!!
-Frank

Apparently he didn’t notice that the second code is “GET REKT NERD” with numbers instead of vowels. These are totally fake! He tried them, and of course they didn’t work.

Oct 9, 2018, 5:12 PM

These are both invalid? Can you double check?

Sent from my iPad

Happy Halloween!

Oct 10, 2018, 5:37 PM

Hello? The codes you sent are not valid.

Sent from my iPad

LOL

Oct 11, 2018, 10:42 AM

Hi?

Man, he never gives up! He probably thought he had me, and got so close but lost out in the end due to chance. It was time for a Twitter conversation over DMs, apparently.

Once More, With Trolling

The Sunflower gives up on email, and decides to try Twitter. Mind you, this is the same Twitter account that has a picture from August where he’s handing out codes! It’s easier to just post the images of our conversation:

Sunflower-DM-0

Sunflower-DM-1.JPG

The last code I sent him? Read it again – it spells “NICE TRY BUDDY.”

Sunflower-DM-2.JPG

He says he’ll check, but we both know the truth – there is no receipt. There never was a receipt. There never was a daughter. There never was an iPad, either.

I haven’t heard from him since, but I hope he reads this blog post!

 

Why Did You Do This, Frank?

Listen, if you think I just did this because I’m a petty artist with too much time on my hands, you’re absolutely correct. Although in my defense, I normally don’t go out of my way to troll people – “The Sunflower” just kept pestering me and I wanted to get him to go away!

The reason I wrote this blog post is to warn indie developers, not just troll people. It’s very easy to fall for these scams when your game first launches – you’re excited that it’s on the store, but there are unexpected bugs all over the place, too. People are reaching out to you for help with issues, puzzles, or writing articles. There’s no time to really tell what’s what, and it’s easy to fall for a sob story about heart surgery or a dastardly daughter.

Customer service will be a new experience for you when you first put your game on the store, but the customer isn’t always right. Sometimes, there never was a customer.

Happy Halloween, scammers!

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Where Shadows Slumber is now available on the App Store! bit.ly/WSS-iOS

Find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.

Calling All Androids

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Greetings, Android fans of Where Shadows Slumber!

I realize many of you were dismayed that our original Sept. 20th launch was only on the App Store, but we have good news. We’re knee-deep in Android testing as we speak, which means you have the opportunity to play Where Shadows Slumber on your Android device before the game launches on Google Play later this year!

Read on for details…

 

BETA.JPG

What To Expect

Where Shadows Slumber is now available on Google Play through their BETA program. This free download allows you to play the first seven Levels of our game. We haven’t updated this thing since March, so if you played it back then you’ll definitely want to give the BETA another shot!

Remember that the purpose of this test is to help us with our upcoming Android launch. If you were hoping for more than seven Levels, we’re sorry! The team is more focused on solving hardware problems than providing a fun experience. (You’ll have to buy the full game for that…) There are 2,500 Android devices in current use, across six different functioning operating system versions. A ton of people still use Android 5.0, but Google is already up to version 9.0! There are so many combinations to test, we can’t possibly handle this on our own.

The BETA will allow you to see if the game runs on your old phone, see how well it performs, get a sense of the game’s controls and puzzles, and experience a tiny snippet of the game’s story. That’s all you need right now!

When you complete the BETA (which should only take 10 minutes) be sure to fill out the survey in the app description. For your convenience, here’s the link:

Google Survey

Happy testing, everyone!

 

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What’s The Plan?

Currently, we have 3,275 people enrolled in the Google BETA, which is awesome! There’s just one problem: Google doesn’t let you let people download your BETA for free if your game costs money. Our game will be $4.99 on Google Play, just like it is on the App Store. So the way we handled this issue was by splitting our game across two store pages. It’s not ideal, but it means that when the full game launches on Android, the BETA will still be hanging out and it will still be free. I guess it will serve as a kind of extra demo until we take it down? This is in addition to our current Demo, which has been on the store since 2016. How confusing!

Our hope is that having three different entries on the Google Play store directing people toward the full game will be better than having just one. It’s a shame we can’t bring all the BETA people directly over to the final game later, but we assume that those who care will follow our prompt when the game launches. We’re thinking of updating the BETA one last time with something that says “ok, the game is out, go buy it!” Whether it will still be playable at that point is still up in the air.

Stay tuned for more news about our upcoming Google Play release. I can’t promise a concrete date just yet, but we are certainly striving to get the game on Android before 2018 ends. That’s all I can say right now!

 

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Where Shadows Slumber is now available on the App Store! bit.ly/WSS-iOS

Find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.

2018 Tour Dates

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This blog post contains all of the conventions, seminars, lectures, and events we’ll be attending during 2018. Keep checking back for more as we update this post, and feel free to recommend en event to us in the comments if you don’t see it here!

 

October

We didn’t get to do too much during our launch month of September, since we planned to stay close to our computers unless all hell broke loose. Now that October is upon us, we have some great educational and promotional events lined up!

October 15th – Lecture @ The Academy of Innovative Technology, Brooklyn NY

A teacher at this really awesome public high school approached us during Play NYC 2018 to see if we’d be willing to come teach her students for a class or two. We were happy to accept! I’ll be speaking to the students in a closed setting about the reality of launching a mobile game on the App Store, our ongoing Android testing process, and life as an indie developer. This event is not open to the public, but I still thought it would be cool to mention it here!

October 20th – Panel @ College of Arts and Letters Alumni Panel, Hoboken NJ

This is another educational event that isn’t open to the public unfortunately, but it is exciting! Last year I was invited to return to my alma mater to field questions from incoming high school students about the art program at the Stevens Institute of Technology. I’m returning again this year, and since Where Shadows Slumber is out on iOS you can bet your tail I’ll be mentioning it every other sentence.

October 23rd – Postmortem @ Stevens Game Development Club, Hoboken NJ

Jack and I have been invited back to our old stomping grounds at Stevens in order to stomp on the ground. (We’re fantastic at it – it’s all about ankle strength, really.) The Stevens Game Development Club was a fantastic resource for us during our college years. I don’t know if I would even be making games if not for the connections I made during my time with the club. We’re returning to do a full postmortem about Where Shadows Slumber and field questions from an audience of aspiring young indie developers. Come join us if you’re in the area, it’s free!

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October 27th – Playcrafting’s Halloween Game Expo

We’re so glad Playcrafting is doing their Halloween Game Expo again this year. After a brief hiatus from the Microsoft Technology Center in Manhattan, Playcrafting is back at their usual spot for a fun-filled Halloween weekend event. We still have pictures from last year, where Jack went as Buster from Arrested Development and I went as “Frank forgot you had to bring a costume.” It was a blast, and we can’t wait to return with our finished game! The Playcrafting general audience has been waiting for Where Shadows Slumber for a long time.

 

November

November is an exciting month! I’ll be travelling to Australia to hit up two conventions “down under.” I originally wanted to hit up PAX Australia while I was going to be in the country, but we didn’t make it into their indie section. (It will be easier to apply to this stuff now that the game is finished – submitting dev builds is always shaky) Here’s our November schedule:

November 2nd – 4th – Supanova Adelaide

I’ll be visiting sunny Adelaide’s showgrounds to check out the first of two Supanova shows, Supanova Adelaide. I can’t wait to show off the game to an entirely new audience that’s probably never even heard of us before. If we meet any fans down there, I’d be pretty shocked. Surprise me, Adelaide!

November 9th – 11th – Supanova Brisbane

After Supanova Adelaide, I’ll fly to Brisbane for the convention the following weekend. It’s fortunate that they ended up right on top of each other, because Supanova has shows year-round. Lucky! For Supanova Brisbane, I’ll be in their chic Bytes and Backlots section, where are the cool people are.

 

What Did I Miss?

We don’t have anything solid in December yet. Are we passing up your favorite video game convention? Don’t let us make a terrible mistake! Leave a comment or harass me through some other digital medium, and I’ll update this post!

 

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Where Shadows Slumber, now available on the App Store! bit.ly/WSS-iOS

Find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.