A lot of elements are currently coming together, and things are getting a little more chaotic than I'd like them to be around Xmas time.
If the past 2 years of Xmas themed chaos (12 games of Xmas, Advent Collection) have taught me one thing, it's not to EVER plan anything around Xmas!
Presents, family visits and the general filling of my face with Xmas cake, will usually get in the way of the coding time, and as such I decided not to push myself into anything moronic this year.
I apologise if you're deeply depressed by this change in your usual schedule, but you got NeonPlat Adventures, and you can pretend that's your super awesome present instead!
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So, the Bundle thing..
There's been a lot of indie bundles lately, and a lot of high profile indie games are getting some nice attention out there in the land of the mainstream.
This is good!

Every step that brings us closer to a world where Nintendo might finally allow me to make a proper JNKPlat on a DS, is a very very good step!
But that'll never happen.

Instead, the mainstream is catching onto these bundles, and the rest of us are basically getting ignored. The event-driven things are getting picked up by blogs and the sort, but nothing else gets a look in anymore.
For me, at least, there used to be a time where I could slap a decent game to a couple of good forums, and it'd end up being played by thousands.
That's happened loads of times!

Nowadays, it'll be buried beneath this week's latest bundle, or if it's DS Homebrew it'll be about 17,000 posts below the latest emulators, or god forbid you make an iOS game!!! Then some idiot makes an identical game, but with a Bird in it!! That's you screwed!



Maybe it's my shit games.
..

...it's probably my shit games.


But it seems it's happening to everyone, and nobody's getting noticed anymore.

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@dedhedzed recently decided to try something out, and is now unwittingly caught in the middle of a huge indie battle.
His plan..
Bring Bundles to the Indie-Freeware community, in the hopes that it pulls the same audience back in our general direction.
The backlash?
The indie community is whinging about the fact that the Bundle strategy only results in highlighting a few choice picks.

In my eyes, that's not what the aim is, in the slightest.
This is merely a jumpstart.
The plan is about getting the audience back, and it's something that (from what I've been reading) the other developers in this bundle are aiming to help out with.

If @dedhedzed continues with his plan, (which all depends on the popularity of this test bundle) it may see a series of regular (twice-monthly?) freeware bundles being built up.


The unnoticed.
The obscure.
The good!!


In my eyes, at least, it'd become a nice freeware-based "Now That's What I Call Indie" collection, if you will. (They Sold Diddly Squat?)
@dedhedzed may unwittingly become the central figure in yet another wonderful game collecting wonderland, joining the ranks of PixelProspector's blog, and Moshboy's Youtube collection, as one of the main pillars for finding these treats.

Meanwhile, developers who contribute to these can help, too, by ensuring a nice bunch of links are waiting for players, should they visit the game's website.

With that in mind, (and, knowing fully well that the current layout here is a bag of crap!) I'm going to be rejigging this site, trying to make it a little more link-oriented, and attempting to help build our freeware community back to the place it once was.
I'll also be continuing to add random pieces of Indie news to the Socoder Newsletter every Friday, even if no bugger ever reads it, and similarly making AGameAWeek for the 2 or 3 that still like playing games that involve stick people/balls, running/bouncing along mud/grass, and ducking under/jumping over stationary spikes/moving spikes.

Freeware isn't dead.
People just don't bother anymore because it's quicker to buy a bundle.
Let's try to fix it.


@dedhedzed's first bundle is on it's way.

99%

(And I apologise in advance if any of the other developers turns out to be a total git who steals all the limelight and pisses all over their own community....)