Hey everyone! This is Kris Szafranski (@druidsduel), the guy in the article. I have often wondered the very same things, so hopefully I can remove the mystery

Hey everyone! This is Kris Szafranski (@druidsduel), the guy in the article. I have often wondered the very same things, so hopefully I can remove the mystery here for others. There is nothing particularly special about my story. It's something of a combo of what wallflower and GuiA wrote already: opportunity, making connections, and tons of hard work. I have a publisher, Surprise Attack Games. They contacted me after seeing the game on IndieDB.com. This was after the Kickstarter, which was indeed very small. The KS was my experiment in self-marketing, something I have very little experience with and in the end it got funded, but it was a struggle and a dose of reality. I hired PR help during the KS as I knew very few people in the industry media directly and social media only gets you so far. I also started attending as many local meet-ups as I could, getting to know the game dev community around me. They had amazing advice and support. Surprise Attack is an indie publisher and I am not a Big Client. I thought my odds were best with a publisher and the deal didn’t come with any advance or other investment. So aside from the KS, the game is self-funded. I only went with the Surprise Attack after we agreed that Steam would be included. Until then, it was more of a distribution deal, which they publically offer to indies on their website. The publisher used a well-known gaming PR person to handle the release. We pitched the author of the article two ideas and she liked them, combining them in a general human-interest type thing. A similar story ran locally last year in Minneapolis where I am based. My former gig was at a popular local company and my work their gained me supporters. This past experience has helped me a ton at having the confidence in networking and talking about my game. In the end it’s just one article and my game’s success or failure is still very much up in the air. I just followed others’ advice: talk about your game all the time, to everyone. Know your audience and make them something they want to play. I'll happily answer any other questions you have have.