Greetings, Grims!

Oak here with some fine news. I'm quite chuffed to announce that THINGS HAVE BEEN GOING SWIMMINGLY. We're now finally on track to release the first major update for Broken Alliance, and also getting on the final release track for CraftCraft (announcement for that soon, hopefully!)

This also brings me to our beloved Death and Taxes. Meanwhile, we've been working on a lil' update, not as serious as the other ones, but important nonetheless. Death and Taxes is now available in Japanese! It might not be the update you've been hoping for (*cough*endlessmode*cough*), but it's something we have been cooking for the last 6 months or so, and are happy to share with you now ^_^

That being said, please enjoy Death and Taxes at a cool -85% off until May 5th :3

Once CraftCraft gets done though, I want to come back to Death and Taxes for a little bit and give it of extra love. Since it's been taking longer though, it must wait a bit more - I hope you understand.


Meanwhile, we're also very happy to be part of LudoNarraCon! Check out the entire event right here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/ludonarracon

And a big-big thank you to Fellow Traveller for organizing the entire thing! If you like narrative games (like Death and Taxes >_>), this event should be totally up your alley. So give it a look-see and maybe you'll find something you'll enjoy!

That's it for now.

Wish us luck - CraftCraft is right around the corner. We're gonna need it ^^'


Much love,
-Death and Taxes

Hi Grims,

This is a special short cross-game announcement for CraftCraft / Death and Taxes!

Quartermaster Mortimer from Death and Taxes is back! And he will be your customer in our next game, CraftCraft... Here is a sneak peek of it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UcNWqSWiOU

You can get to know him a bit more and see where your friendship leads you. :)

We are happy to see our friend return and he is, like always, voiced by the gruff and warm sounding Isaak Wells!

You can wishlist CraftCraft here, it will help us a lot!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2226430/CraftCraft_Fantasy_Merchant_Simulator/

See you soon!
Leene

Happy Birthday to you, Grims!

Creative Director Leene here and I just wanted to let you know that, today, 5 years ago, we released Death and Taxes and this calls for a moment of celebration! And to share some fun DnT stuff you might have missed plus a surprise in the end of the post.... wow, 5 years has gone quick!

Let's go over the things that have happened!

Well firstly, after 3 years of work, we released Death and Taxes in February 20th 2020. We did that with 0 budget, struggling team with revenue share and most people working on it part time on the side of their jobs. So completely bootstrapped and self published!

If you are interested in seeing an Indie Developer documentary and want to see how our release week went and a bit behind the scenes, you can take look at this free documentary about a game dev co-living place in Sweden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4oBSm3QJk4

After that, in October we released a big Halloween update and called the game complete as everything we wanted to add was in there. Adding Cerris bar and plenty of characters to chat to. Including some voice acting by Stupendium who made a really good song about the game, go check out "Rest Employed" on youtube, if you haven't yet!

Now over the years we have localized the game in multiple languages and stores, including all the consoles and even a mobile version of the game! We partnered up with Pineapple works to help port it and Hawthorn Games to bring it to the Chinese market as well!

The game has sold over half a million copies on Steam, a bunch of copies on other consoles and we have been part of donation events where we gave away hundreds of thousands of copies for charity so I would say the game is owned by around a million people by now!

I love reading all of your your experiences and comments about the game, good or bad and I am glad the game has meant as much for some people as it has for me! There has been so much fan art and it's quality has blown me away, sometimes it is better than the art in the game. The most wild thing we saw was this 100 page Fan zine collecting art and fan stories that was made for our 2 year anniversary! You can download the free PDF here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HnT7_E8jzm_iCWuwwDvIpRt7I9eNi1LK/view?usp=sharing

Also in 2022, to thank all the fans for their art, I made this free downloadable adult coloring/activity book of the art of Death and Taxes that you can get here:
http://media.voog.com/0000/0044/9676/files/DnTColoringBook.pdf

Anyways, I don't want to keep this too long, but I wanted to thank everybody who has been part of this, either making the game, doing volunteer localization or just being there to support us as we have been making this game and our new games! You are always welcome to say hello to me and other devs at our Discord.

Currently, I have been really busy directing another game that comes out soon too... And about that...

...the surprise! If you love our skeleton pirate, Mortimer the Quartermaster, then you might be happy to hear that he will be back in our next game. More about it in our second post about CraftCraft: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1166290/view/501691675000701042



Take care! ❤︎
Leene

Hi Grims!

Oak here. Happy to see you again!

We're delighted to announce that we're going deeper into the abyss with our discounts for Death and Taxes, now at a whopping -85% off!

That being said, I also want to give you an update on what we have in store for y'all! We are finalizing our Japanese localization for the game, which should arrive quite soon! In fact, I had hoped that maybe we could finish it for this promotion, but alas, time ran out due to our other projects (Broken Alliance and CraftCraft) needing our attention.

In addition, there are a few things I've been pondering and tinkering with, on the side. There have been many requests for an "endless" mode and a statistics screen for your deeds as a Grim Reaper. Again, time and other life events got in the way of those, and while these are still things that I would like to add to the game, they will have to wait for now.

I do hope that any new and old Grims will find some joy seeing our game on the pages of good ol' Steam again, and maybe it'll give you that small push to do another run ^_^


I wish you all the best, and hope to give you some more exciting news soon.


Much love,
-Death and Taxes


PS: Big thank you to 'sal' from our Discord server for providing me with endless amusement with their fanart featured on the cover of this post <3

Hello Grims!

It is almost 5 years from the initial release of Death and Taxes.
We have been very busy making a new games, Broken Alliance and CraftCraft: Fantasy Merchant Simulator...

But we also have small updates to share for Death and Taxes! We are almost done with Japanese localization and also we are planning a small update to show more stats to the player! That will be soon, we'll let you know! And also Death and Taxes is on daily deal on a deep discount! Welcome new players if you are here for the first time!

And on to the the big news, Broken Alliance is now out in Early Access today! The game is like a love letter to pixel art, old-school adventure games, mythical creatures and fantasy storytelling. So if you like that sort of stuff, check it out!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1704180/Broken_Alliance/

Even though the game is in such a different genre than Death and Taxes, you can still see similar things in the new game:

We have full voice over as always, deep story focus ...

...and we are working with same people, so you could hear the new music work from our Composer Adam, we have art from our artists Leene and Raido who worked together on Death and Taxes, just this time in a vibrant pixel art world, we have the same tech lead, Oak. So the gang is all together, just with additional members who bring in a deeper sound design and a lot more art/ gameplay.



We are so excited!!! Oh and there is a free demo to try of the game too. :)

Thanks for your support and we might have more news soon!

Leene

Hey everyone! Oak here.

I accidentally messed up the streaming settings for SimFest, but now it's live again!

Have fun watching ^_^

Hello Grims! Oak here.

I love to be the bringer of good news and I'm proud to say that we have finally finished up the Spanish translation! Many, many thanks to all the people who helped get this done!

Much love to:

• Luka Giacco
  
• María Geraldía Villar
  
• B-Retz
  
• ChrisDK
  
• Salvador Manuel Quezada Godoy
  
• Christine "Dottie" Dottle
  
• JoseB
  
• Kassiopeia
  
• Literally King Arthur (Vic)
  
• Lucia
  
• Razsher
  
• kasseto
  
• killunya
  
• Ramiro Cibrián Carrasco

We finally made it. I'm so happy. I know many of you have been asking for a Spanish translation even before we released the full game, so, here it is! I hope you enjoy it. I can't stress enough how glad I am for us to have such an awesome community ^_^

On top of that, we're also participating in SimFest right here on Steam! Give the organizers (Fireshine Games, Stray Fawn, and Future Friends Games) and participants some love and be sure to check out all the cool games being showcased. To commemorate the occasion, we're gonna be a chill -80% off for 10 days until August 3rd!

And last but not least, I do want to do a quick reminder, that we did add some new content to the game, namely: hats!






So if you want to give the game another go, and play around while being a bit more dapper, now's your chance ^_^

Ahhh I'm so glad I can finally say that we got the game done in Spanish. Do note that the translation is going to be updated in the coming days and there may be some small adjustments to the texts here and there, because we really wanted to get the update out by today, because of the start of our participation in SimFest. I do hope that you'll have a good time with the game!

And that's it for now. Thank you for all of your support, it's been a wonderful four and a half years of Death and Taxes already.

Also as a quick teaser... Death and Taxes will also be on mobiles soon >_>
I'll let y'all know when it drops. But until then...

Much love,
-Death and Taxes

Hello Grims!

Oak here again, bringing good news and updates galore. Just recently we launched the demo for one of our new games: CraftCraft! Make sure to give it a whirl if you like... well, crafting.

Additionally, we're on the final stretch of our Spanish translation effort, it's about 90% done now, and all we need to do is finish it up, proofread it, test it, and let it into the wild for y'all to play :)

Once that's done I'll make a separate announcement.

Also in more Death and Taxes related news, it's also coming to mobile phones (both iOS and Android hopefully). I will keep you posted about that, but it's already running on Android, and I will try to get it up on mobile storefronts as soon as possible.

ALSO, as you may have noticed, Steam Summer Sale has finally started! Death and Taxes is a cozy -80% off, so it's pretty much the best time to get into the game if you haven't yet! I'm also going to run a stream on the store page so you can see what the game is actually like (and share some behind-the-scenes trivia as well).

So yeah, that's it for now! I hope all you Grims have a cool summer!

Much love,
-Death and Taxes

Hi Grims, Creative Director Leene here!

We have been busy at work on our 2 new games and I am happy to announce that you can try the free demo of CraftCraft: Fantasy Merchant Simulator now here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2226430/CraftCraft_Fantasy_Merchant_Simulator/
So excited for this milestone!

Demo includes:
*A quite varied character creation! (be a mysterious moth-person, or goth elf, or a whimsical cat-person or anything in between)


*A desktop simulation like in Death and Taxes, but even more hands on! Express your creativity, make jewelry and smith in 2D Simulation!


*Meet first 3 fully voice acted characters and sell jewelery and swords to them!


*Death and Taxes fans might also recognize the music in CraftCraft from our awesome composer, Adam Bow.

Try it out now and optionally tell us what you think. Looking forward to seeing some characters/jewelery you come up with too if you would like to share!

Also wishlist the game so you get notified when it releases fully (SOOON).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2226430/CraftCraft_Fantasy_Merchant_Simulator/

Thank you for your support!
-Leene

Hello Grims!

Oak here. Since Leene was busy with CraftCraft, I took it upon myself to stream a bit of Death and Taxes for y'all!

Tune in if you want to see a bit of behind-the-scenes stuff, and if you want to get some smol announcements as well ^_^

Stay Grim!


Much love,
-Death and Taxes