Indie Game Splash Release & Retrospective

It's been a few days since I released Indie Game Splash so I wanted to reflect on the project and what's next for the indie game zine.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I switched over to using Scribus for formatting the zine and I'm really glad I did! The program doesn't offer a lot of guidelines or formatting when you start a new document- but once you mess around with the settings the program works wonderfully! The only genuine friction I ran into was how to format images and how fiddly it can be to edit text (ex: there's no italics option from what I can tell???). Otherwise it was a smooth learning curve and formatting ended up being a lot of fun! I struggle a lot with graphic design but I'm relatively proud of what I managed to pull off with this zine- especially the logo. Originally I planned on hiring someone to design a logo but that didn't end up working out!

There ended up getting around 20 submissions for the zine which was way more than I expected- which meant I couldn't include every submission. I was expecting to create a 24 page zine but it ended up being 48 pages (including front and back covers, credits, etc..). For this reason I'm not going to be able to produce physical prints of the zine for free as the cost would be way too much. I plan to have a free "demo" version of IGS that I will be printing for any art/zine events I table at to get more eyes on it!

As for the future of Indie Game Splash I plan to continue the zine for at least 2 more issues! If the project manages to have a lot of support and excitement I would definitely love to create more. I have a few ideas of what to include in future issues so keep an eye out for that! I already know what my plan is for issue #2. I will be posting about that sometime in September!

Thanks again to everyone who has checked out the zine already and an extra special thank you to everyone who submitted to the project! Without you, this zine wouldn't have been possible!