@indieboxliv@aireye What's your process for selecting who to work with? Is it usually you guys reaching out or vice versa? Any dream clients you'd love to work with but haven't had the chance yet?
@russfrushtick I can speak to who we work with, but I'll throw it to @aireye for dream clients! We find developers (and they find us) all sorts of different ways. Some approach us a conferences, others we are referred to. Some take a third path, and we find them completely by accident. Once a subscriber tweeted at us just with a heart and the developers name, and we discovered that game through that one tweet. It went into a box a few months later!
We encourage developers to contact us. Even if a game isn't right for a subscription box, we can always help them out with a privately manufactured box that is much more customizable!
@russfrushtick I've been working in the indie space for a really long time (helping start Indie Fund back in 2010, but i've been making independent games since 2003). So i have a lot of friends that I've made over the years, and a lot of them have been excited to do boxes with us. But there are so many amazing developers now that most of the boxes we do are from people that the IndieBox team has reached out to (or have come to us, as Liv points out)
@russfrushtick I would have loved to have done a Minecraft box but now that Microsoft owns it, seems pretty unlikely we'll do a Microsoft product in an *Indie*box.
@russfrushtick as for other dream clients, there really are so many great indie games coming out this year, but what works best for us is a game that has a theme that makes it easy to design physical things for (i.e. a game with developed characters is easier to make a box than an abstract puzzle game). Its also really helpful when the developer answers their email quickly -- given we have to produce things so quickly since it takes a long time to make physical items we have to move very quickly to get the product to our subscribers on time
They've done special editions for games like Risk of Rain, Luftrausers and Rogue Legacy. In case you're the sort that needs to have something on a physical shelf, it's a pretty great service.
@aireye and @indieboxliv will be joining us from 9am to 10am PT to answer questions about IndieBox this month's collector's edition: Captain Forever Remix!
How do you come up with the items in the box? Does the developer typically come to you with ideas or do you look at the game and then start working on what would work in the box?
@ryan_olsen Hi Ryan! It is actually a lot more collaborative than that. Once we know we're making the box, we set up a time for the teams to meet. The developer(s) jump on a Skype call with the IndieBox team, and we brainstorm for about an hour. Then we go figure out how to make those things, come up with a couple of different box ideas, and present them to the developer. We work with the developers to pick the most awesome box, and we start production!
@indieboxliv@ryan_olsen we also do a lot of brainstorming over slack. you can't come up with every good idea in just an hour or two -- you've got to give it a couple days to come up with the really cool ideas (I find my best ideas happen when i'm taking a hot shower!)
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