Feature: 'Postmortem: Klei Entertainment’s Eets: Hunger. It’s emotional.'

In today's main Gamasutra feature, indie developer Klei Entertainment reveals serious insight into distribution wrangling and the importance of community building, in this exclusive Gamasutra portmortem of independent PC puzzle game Eets: Hunger. It's emotional. In the following passage, Klei Entertainment President Jamie Cheng reveals how the online video game community and uber-popular webcomic Penny Arcade helped shape the game in its earlier stages: "In June 2005, Klei Entertainment Inc. released an online preview of Eets: Hunger. It's emotional, and received an impressive amount of feedback. With zero budget in marketing, we garnered 7,500 downloads over a single weekend. Much praise has to be given to Tycho from Penny Arcade, whose link distorted our web stats by the hour (we could literally see the stat bars rocket upward, AT, or “After Tycho”), and to Fileplanet, who graciously hosted the demo and placed it on the front sidebar. These players flocked to our forums, and gave us high praise and invaluable feedback on how to improve our game. You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including the back-and-forth of working out a deal with Valve's Steam (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).