Two Years of Widget Satchel: A Postmortem

Mark LaCroix

Indie developers don’t know much about publishing games. Mark LaCroix definitely didn’t, even after years of attending GDC talks, reading articles, and interviewing other developers for his podcast, “Nice Games Club.” So, he used (what started as) a low-stakes game jam project to learn everything about getting a game out into the world, from obtaining international age ratings to pitching to console makers. It was supposed to take a few months, tops.

Two years later, “Widget Satchel” launched on Nintendo Switch and PC, secured a Japanese publisher, and had an actual marketing budget… which, spoilers, oops. In this talk, Mark will reveal what went wrong to make that happen.

Mark LaCroix is a developer, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist whose work has appeared in many forms all over the world, from European film festivals to municipal murals, Xbox Live to Amazon Prime, and in two separate Emmy-winning television series.

He is the creator and co-host of Nice Games Club, and his company Noble Robot is the developer of Widget Satchel, a “Metroidvania-lite” starring a ferret on a space station.

Mark lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three computers.

Designing an Indie DLC

Dev Jana

Newt One is a nonviolent musical 3D platformer developed (motsly) in the Twin Cities and released on all platforms in Feb 2019. We’re releasing our 2nd DLC this Spring. We’ll look at what steps went into the design and development of the new DLC.

Dev is the President of Code and Noises at DevNAri LLC (developers of Newt One), Director of Full Stack Instruction at Prime Digital Academy, and an adjunct Professor of Game Design at Augsburg University.

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