[Applause]
>> In 1987, a file format was made that changed the face of independent game promotion.
That format was GIF (or JIF).
No, seriously if there's anything you get out of this talk, it's if you're making something
with motion, get GIFs in your workflow.
My name is Leaf Corcoran, thank you for coming to see me.
I am not Leif Erikson, I am not Nordic, a lot of people seem to ask that, I was actually
named after these things, I grew up on a organic farm.
And what I did was I founded this website.
So it's a place for independent game creators to distribute their work with as little barriers
as possible, as Andy was saying.
It's really been picking up a lot of *steam* lately --
[Laughter] [Applause]
There's around 47,000 projects as of this
past month.
I say projects because there's more than just games.
But before I really talk about what makes it special, I kind of want to talk about its
inception, about the moment when a side project becomes -- well, something more.
About how the community shaped what I thought about what I was creating.
I want to talk about these first eight or so months.
There was nothing there, and I had zero expectations, and I had no idea what I was getting myself
into.
So like any would-be creator, I had a lot of ambitions but not much willpower.
[laughter] I liked writing software, I knew I wanted to do something with open source
software, and so around 2012, GitHub released this calendar thing.
The idea is essentially you upload code to their servers, and you get this little green
box.
And every day you do this in a row, you get a streak.
And the more code you push, the darker this box would be.
Needless to say, I was hooked.
This was the last time I went outside. [Laughter]
I put a lot of unhealthy expectations on myself,
and my calendar had turned into something like this.
The gray box you see on the bottom is actually today probably, so you know what I'll be doing
after this.
And I got this mentality, like, any idea was good, just let me try to finish it.
Let me try to work through something.
And this system of these boxes really worked for me, and it gave me a lot of consistent
drive.
And mainly a lot of these changes are pretty minor, README changes, single-line code changes,
but I think the important thing is that there's always something consistent there.
And that's when I started to explore some of the bigger ideas I wanted to check out.
And one of those was -- well, let's make a programming language.
So most people who have interest in computer science, they think critically about the language
they use because it's essentially how we talk to computers.
And some of us, like, take that fascination very far.
And so I ended up making something.
It's called Moonscript, the first Sailor Moon-inspired programming language.
[Applause] This wasn't, like, a weekend project.
This was literally eight months of my life.
But it's a transpiled language that compiles into something called Lua, which is something
a lot of game developers used.
I was very into game development, I wanted to make games, but I hadn't done it, and I
didn't really know how.
So I made this instead for fun.
And like any self-respected programmer who finishes a project, you post on Hacker News
and you get what's coming.
But it was a good point.
What was the point?
I needed a way to prove that it was useful to myself.
And so that's when I started thinking, well, maybe I could make some games.
And I found this thing called Ludum Dare, a game jam that’s split into two tracks,
solo and team-based, the solo one is 48 hours long.
And the gist is you can use existing libraries, but you have to code, do art, sound, gameplay,
all in the course of a weekend.
And I cannot recommend this more.
It's the first time I went from starting something to finishing something in such a short period.
I think a lot of creators will start projects and then get really good at starting projects,
but they don't get a lot of practice at finishing things.
So this gave me a lot of that.
And I made a lot of really goofy, weird stuff.
And I interacted with a lot of developers who were doing similar projects.
Nothing big.
Nothing making money.
Just small things that were interesting to play around with.
Here's something I made where you play a detached pixel art version of my head eating steak,
pasta, and soda.
And apparently I vomit all over the place.
Anyway, ideas started to come to me.
Where do these little creations belong?
Mainly there were places on the internet where you could put them, but it didn't make sense.
A website that was 30% ads, 30% brand, 20% other people's games.
Yeah, that didn't sound very good.
And something else also happened around that time.
Steam released something called Steam Greenlight.
It was a way for independent creators to get their work onto Steam to be sold.
And the way it worked is you had to upload your thing and people would vote on it and
people would comment on it.
And if you happened to be in the top tier, they might let you through.
So obviously a lot of developers did not like it.
I saw people begging for votes on Twitter, things like, oh, free Steam key if you vote
on my game.
Something wasn't right, and I figured I could make something.
So remember now I'm still coding everything in Moonscript, and it runs on an environment
that's not really suited for web.
And luckily the technology stars kind of aligned, and I saw some things that were happening
that I thought maybe, okay, if I wanted to actually see this through, maybe I should
start trying to build a web framework.
So kind of similar thing as before, I kind of was digging myself into a hole.
Luckily, yeah, I made something many months later.
I was able to release the first version.
And in tandem, I built and launched a brand-new indie game marketplace.
There wasn't much.
It was literally one game on the site when I launched.
There was no marketing plan.
I didn't have any strategy or anything like that.
It was one of my Ludum Dare games.
Because there's nothing I was afraid to actually put a link to browse the games.
It was a chicken and egg problem, right?
It wouldn't be easy to convince people if they just saw my game on it.
But regardless there was a vision.
And I started to see a little direction of what I was doing.
It was open for anyone.
Part of the problem with Steam Greenlight is that Steam was a closed system and Greenlight
was how they got them in.
Here's something anyone could just enter.
It was pay-what-you-want, I was really inspired by Bandcamp.
Instead of having a fixed price, what about having a minimum price and anyone can pay
as much as they want depending on how they want to support the creator.
And a lot of games end up being zero dollars so people would just donate to these games.
And you can design what your games page looked like.
I want people to keep the identity of their games.
I didn't want us to force things of our brand on their pages.
I didn't want any advertisements, anything like that.
So these seem like good ideas, but there was nothing.
I didn't have much to do in the first couple of months, so I just kept on adding new features.
I did some more Ludum Dares, trying to promote it through there, but really there was not
much adoption.
And then something happened.
Probably not my hard work.
Flappy Bird came out.
Do you all know what Flappy Bird is?
Yeah, so Flappy Bird is this game a developer created, it became insanely popular.
He uploaded it, and it was too much for him, and he took it down.
And a lot of people harassed him.
It was pretty bad actually.
Interestingly enough, though, I kind of wonder what's the reaching influence of this game
because if it affected me, who knows how many other people it changed.
In any case, one of our members created a gamejam.
Create games in the style of Flappy Bird, incredibly difficult, and it was in support
of the Flappy Bird creator’s decision to take their game down.
Their decision to do whatever they want with their game.
And this was really popular.
It got 800 submissions.
This is at a time when I was getting a couple games a week maybe at most.
And that was a lot.
And the baseline changed.
Even after the jams’ excitement died down, we were getting 10 to 20 times as many games
per week.
I should have been happy, but I kind of had this feeling -- oops, I made something people
are using.
And the reason why it's oops is because, like, this is a website now people kind of expect
to be working, and I'm this person who wrote all of this janky code that happens to be
running it and what happens if it goes down?
Is it going to ruin the reputation of the site?
And there were bugs, there was actually a problem where the site would randomly go down,
and I didn't know what was going on, and it could happen when I was sleeping, and it was
incredibly stressful for me.
On top of this, I had questions about, like, am I building a real company?
Especially as the site started to grow.
I live in San Francisco, and I think there's a very common path that a lot of companies
take.
So I started questioning myself.
Should I be looking for investors, should I be trying to raise money?
Should I have advisors?
Like, what should I really be doing?
And I was really unsure of the path I was taking.
Should I have quit my job yesterday or who knows?
I remember I was talking to someone who was starting their own game company, and they
were telling me how they had a whole team ready to go, they had the investors ready
to go, and he was telling me how you get the investment, how the investors are into doing
their due diligence and trying to reduce the risk as much as possible.
So he said in addition to looking at who the founder actually is, they like to look at
the tech stack of the company, to see if it’s something people could be hired to work on.
Well, he asked me what's your site written in?
And, you know, I was, like, the usual stuff.
[Laughter] But I'm glad I had that conversation because
it kind of put things into perspective for me.
And lastly, people wanted to know how do you actually pronounce the name of the site?
I bought the domain years before I made the website.
.io names were popular I guess, and I happened to buy one named itch.
People asked me if it means something with games.
No.
I just used it because it was sitting around.
To this day, I honestly don't know how I should be saying it in front of people.
So I have probably ruined some branding rule there.
In case you are curious, it’s all valid: itch.io, itchy, itchio.
And, yeah, I think things just kind of worked out.
I decided to stay independent and work things my own way.
I was lucky enough to find people I could actually hire.
I invested some of my own money that I’d been saving up.
And doing things my own way.
So I submitted it to Steam Greenlight. [Laughter]
I made a companion ASMR trailer guided meditation
video. [Laughter]
These are pretty popular.
Our fans rejoiced. [Laughter]
And I'm pretty sure we set new records.
I don't know.
This is the interface Steam gives you when your thing's on Greenlight.
Sadly, we got rejected.
They wrote this long nice response, you don't have to read it, pretty much saying we weren't
the right type of content.
So I tried to get it back in.
And I linked this other thing I found on Steam, which happens to be this.
[Laughter] They didn't buy it.
I think they didn't want me on their platform.
It's okay.
All jokes aside, though.
I think something special was starting to form.
And in the beginning although I was saying oops, I created something, I was starting
to also change my attitude.
I realized that the things creators were uploading kind of define the site.
There were no expectations but when I saw the things people uploaded, a lot of them
were really inspiring.
People were using them to distribute things that were incredibly interesting.
Things that don't really make sense on a traditional store.
People were using it to host bundles for causes that were really important.
It was a way for game developers to have a voice.
This particular one was a bundle for someone trying to raise money for their surgery.
I never imagined I would be a part of something like this.
Yeah, I was blown away.
And even as we coded more functionality, the premise had to stay the same.
The store pages are unlike any store, it's more like the developers’ own landing pages
if they made it for their game themselves.
Even the profile pages are super unique.
This one I particularly like because the developer added some CSS that makes it slowly zoom out
over 800 seconds.
So if you're reading it, you'll think something's going on, but you're not quite sure.
And you'll be questioning your sanity.
[Laughter] You're not going to see it here.
And, yeah, some of these pages were like art pieces.
It was so unique.
It's not entirely obvious here, but this is actually snapped out of the browser.
Yeah, they combine imagery from the game and a bunch of aesthetics from the game to give
you this whole experience before you go and download the game.
That’s not something you’d see on a regular storefront.
I really like when people build embedded browser games and use the layout of the screen as
part of the game itself.
So it's kind of like you have this whole experience.
Really cool stuff.
I really enjoyed it.
And another thing just using subtle animation to kind of make the pages feel alive.
It doesn't really have to be in your face or flashy.
Just something that makes an experience.
So after seeing all of this, I felt connected.
I really wanted to see the people who were uploading these things to succeed.
I was emotionally attached.
I had anxiety for them, I felt terrible if they didn't sell well.
I felt ecstatic when they succeeded.
The decisions I made could have a significant impact on them.
So I saw myself as an indie developer building something for Indies.
So time came to actually make money, and so we needed some sort of revenue sharing options,
and I wanted to do it our own way.
So I put a slider on our dashboard that lets the seller pick what they wanted to give back
to the marketplace.
So if they were running a bundle or trying to do something for a cause or trying to pay
for rent or pay for food, like, it didn't make sense to take a cut of that.
I want them to feel okay to put it at zero.
Or if they were doing something interesting and appreciate what we were doing, then sure,
put it up to a high number.
Whatever.
And the response was really good.
People enjoyed it.
I think it sticks around 8% now, which is not bad.
So, yeah, we focused on building tools for developers and creators first.
How could we remove the most barriers?
How could we make it easy to distribute while letting the developers keep the individuality
of what they were creating?
So, yeah, our next product was this thing called Refinery.
So Steam has this thing called Early Access.
If you're a game developer, you might be familiar with it.
Essentially you upload your game and the whole world can download it, and they get pissed
off that it's not done.
[laughter] So we saw developers talking about stuff like this is and someone should do something.
So we built something that was more for developers where they could release their unfinished
game to a smaller audience and control who could go in.
And that was an example of a platform that was responding directly to the problems of
the developers and people just loved that.
So when people try to compare us to Steam, I think that's kind of unfair.
A lot of the bigger marketplaces are off cloning one another trying to provide the same feature
set.
I really want us to try to provide a different set of features that kind of appeals closer
to the smaller developers just trying to do something interesting.
And so, yeah, that's how we arrived here today.
I went from someone who was poking around randomly writing some weird code projects
to someone who had a product and a vision.
I went through a transformation, and I'm incredibly impressed by all the other people who kind
of got behind it and supported it.
Yeah, like I said before, there's tens of thousands of games and people are happy and
selling games.
It's great.
Thanks.
[Applause]