📌 Checking in

Written by Renkon

Hello there! Long time no see, eh? I come to you hat in hand to apologize for disappearing for about a year without saying anything. I especially would like to say that I deeply regret taking so long to translate the interviews that two game developers were gracious enough to have with me. I will be working on getting those up in the coming days.

So, what happened?

Burnout, and switching zine issues from monthly to numbered

To be completely honest, I had been slowly running out of energy since around the end of 2023. I was still finding lots of cool games that I wanted to talk about, but the sheer workload of writing about them, arranging interviews with game devs, translating them, getting them all up online, doing social media publicity, putting together the month issues, preparing for and attending events… it was all kind of getting to be quite a lot. I should have taken things slower instead of try to force myself to keep the same pace I’d been going at.

Going forward, I am going to try to pace myself a little better and listen to my body when it says it needs to stop. To that end, we will retire the monthly zine issue format. Issues will instead change to a numbering system, and will pull from articles that go up on the site whenever I can get around to them, and not to any particular deadline. I hope that I can still put up new stuff at fairly regular intervals (and not go radio silent for a year!) but I do think a much slower update pace is in order. I really appreciate everyone for their patience, and I hope to have some new stuff up right quick.

Banishing Twitter

There is also the matter of the 2024 US Presidential Election and its long, tortured run-up. Around summer of last year, Daikon and I made the hard decision to delete the Nice Gear Games Twitter account for what I hope are obvious reasons. This, unfortunately, meant cutting ourselves off from probably the best means of communicating with other Japanese game developers. This made it more difficult to reach folks we wanted to interview, to keep up with other people’s projects, and to keep up to date on gaming events. I have zero regrets on deleting our Twitter, but it is just a fact that without one, a lot of information about Japanese indie games has been closed off to us.

Going forward, we will not be linking to X/Twitter accounts for developers or contributors, even if that is their only website or means of contact. This is an editorial decision on which I am not in willing to compromise. If the only way to contact a game dev or find information about a game is through their Twitter, I will not be covering it.

Happy Hour moved to Sundays

Due to the hectic nature of our weekday schedules, we have moved Happy Hour to Sundays from 9PM UTC+9… except for the days when we will also be busy on Sundays. In those cases, I will try to announce the next streaming schedule in advance! I’m sorry for all those times when I didn’t say anything, sometimes life comes at you fast. You can catch our livestreams by following our YouTube channel!

So, what next?

Getting back into things

I have been away from the site for about a year now, and I need to ease myself back into the process. I am working on getting those two aforementioned interviews up soon. I am really excited to start writing again. I have an enormous list of games I’ve been playing and would love more people to know about!

Year 2 book is still in the works

I make no promises on when this will come out, but I am going to try and get it out soon. After this Year 2 book, much like the monthly issues, I will no longer be limiting them to time periods and instead will change to a numbered system that go out when they’re ready to go out.

Thank you again for sticking with Indie Tsushin after all this time. I hope to be back very soon with more updates very soon!

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