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
• Mara Geralda Villar
• B-Retz
• ChrisDK
• Salvador Manuel Quezada Godoy
• Christine "Dottie" Dottle
• JoseB
• Kassiopeia
• Literally King Arthur (Vic)
• Lucia
• Razsher
• kasseto
• killunya
• Ramiro Cibrin Carrasco

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

Hi Grims! Oak here. Excuse my terrible puns, but I have an announcement to make! Death and Taxes is available now on both XBox and PlayStation! If you have not taken the *grim* plunge yet, now is the time! Additionally, we are available also on the Nintendo Switch! If you've been waiting to enjoy Death and Taxes on consoles, this is the moment to do so! ^_^ That's it for now (yes we are still hard at work on the Spanish translation, it's getting there!). Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hello Grims! 'tis the season again! Death and Taxes turned FOUR years old! Unfathomably cool to think about. As has been tradition, we try do take care of our first game, which means that occasionally we get the urge to just... put more content in the game. And we did. Again. We added hats into the game. I repeat: you can now wear *hats*. Also, we're a historic -80% off for 2 weeks to celebrate the occasion (big thanks to Valve for giving a helping hand in organizing this!)
We had a whole bunch of ideas for accessorizing one's Grim Reaper, and it always felt that hats would be such a natural addition to everything. After having added them to the game, it really feels like they totally have belonged there from the start! You have 15 hats to choose from, out of 3 types and 5 variations for each. So uhh, yes! Try them! It'll be neat, I promise.
Also, the Spanish translation is also coming along nicely. Hopefully we will have more news about this quite soon ^_^ In addition, we're also joining a bundle with the games Orwell and CorpoNation, the Difficult Decisions Bundle! Thank you everyone for your continued support! It's always a delight to see new players discover our lil' game. And if there's something that goes awry with the update, please let me know so I can start fixing it immediately >_> But in any case, as soon as you get the mirror, you should be able to equip hats! Also, don't forget that we're working on 2 new games! CraftCraft and Broken Alliance! Do wishlist them if they pique your ineterest ^_^

Hello everyone Death and Taxes is now participating in the Lunar New Year Festival 2024. Hope you like our game!

Hello Grims! Oak here again! Long time no see ^_^ I'm happy and extremely proud to announce that Death and Taxes was selected to be a part of the Storyteller's Festival! If you are interested in narrative-driven games, this is your one stop shop to satisfy all those needs. Many thanks to Two and a Half Studios for hosting us! ADDITIONALLY! If you've got this far (I hope!) I'm also pleased to tease that there will be a teeny tiny little update coming for Death and Taxes soon. Something to do with the Grim Reaper's attire, perhaps? >_> More to come on that soonish, as we approach the FOURTH (holy heck) anniversary of Death and Taxes. Thank you everyone for sticking around so long X_X And last but not least, we are still underway with localizing the game into Spanish, so stay tuned for that! I will share more news about this as it comes by. Much love! -Death and Taxes

Hi Grims, Please enjoy the Autumn Sale! Hurry amd get Death and Taxes at 70% off to start your reaping life!

It's been about a year since we started work on CraftCraft, a Fantasy Merchant Simulator where you use your wits as a blacksmith to fight for the creative future of a town. To be honest, it's been an adventure. From interesting bugs to changes in look and style and adding new faces to the team . One of the most beautiful things about Game Development is that it's not a race, it's a journey. And we are so glad to share this journey with so, so many wonderful people. If you want to be the first person to know when the demo comes out, go ahead and wishlist CraftCraft on steam. Or, if you just want to see our progress, feel free to follow us here! Additionally, since it's the three-year anniversary of the Death and Taxes Halloween update, we'd like to take this moment to wish you all a Happy Halloween! If you haven't had the chance to play it through yet, we highly recommend you check it out. Our Creative Director, Leene Knnap, will be playing the game **tomorrow** at 7pm EEST, or 1pm EST at https://www.twitch.tv/spelkollektivet ! To all fans of our previous game, Death and Taxes, and those excited for our next games: Thank you so much for all your support, from all of us here at Placeholder Gameworks. We can't wait to show you what else we have in store.

It's been about a year since we started work on CraftCraft, a Fantasy Merchant Simulator where you use your wits as a blacksmith to fight for the creative future of a town. To be honest, it's been an adventure. From interesting bugs [Cut playthrough in] to changes in look and style [Composition of concept sketches, timelapses, etc] and adding new faces to the team [Chaotic conversation, maybe a meeting?]. One of the most beautiful things about Game Development is that it's not a race, it's a journey. And we are so glad to share this journey with so, so many wonderful people. If you want to be the first person to know when the demo comes out, go ahead and wishlist CraftCraft on steam. Or, if you just want to see our progress, feel free to follow us here! Additionally, since it's the three-year anniversary of the Halloween update, we'd like to take this moment to wish you all a Happy Halloween! If you haven't had the chance to play it through yet, we highly recommend you check it out. Our Creative Director, Leene Knnap, will be playing the game **tomorrow** at 7pm EEST, or 1pm EST at https://www.twitch.tv/spelkollektivet ! To all fans of our previous game, Death and Taxes, and those excited for our next games: Thank you so much for all your support, from all of us here at Placeholder Gameworks. We can't wait to show you what else we have in store.

Hello Grims! I have a few cool updates for you (and a special hello to all our visitors from the Visual Novel Fest)! First of all, we finally hit 300 000 copies sold on Steam! This is quite the milestone for us, especially considering that the game has been out for nearly THREE AND A HALF YEARS (unholy macaroni that's a lot). We're still amazed at how the game is making rounds into new and more varied communities, which gives us a lot of hope for our other games as well (please wishlist Broken Alliance, CraftCraft and Artist Life Simulator) >_> That being said, I want to extend our thanks from the entire team at Placeholder, because we couldn't be making games if it weren't for you. Thanks for being around ^_^ In other news, translation efforts are going well for Death and Taxes! We have reached 41% in French, over 80% in European Spanish and 22% in Latin American Spanish, and a recent addition, Ukranian, is plowing in strong at 11% done. A big, heartfelt thank you to all our translators!
Oh, and one last thing... we had a fanart contest in our Discord server, and here are the submissions! Tadopole - Dead End
Urzula - Postcard
Sam - Atro on a Swing
Ladyybugg3039 - Suns Out Buns Out
Nerdy McFarland - Jack O Lantern Attack
Lienpixels - Horned Reaper on Beach
Mich - Away on Vacation
Stay tuned, because we will announce the winners soon! But until then, let us know which of these picture *you* like the most! And that was it for this time! I hope you enjoyed this small update ^_^ Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hi Grims! We hope you all can enjoy the Summer Sale. If you're interested in Death and Taxes, take this opportunity to purchase the game at 70% off. Happy reaping!

Hi Grims! We are pleased to announce that we are now participating in LudoNarraCon 2023!

Hi Grims! It's Oak here, with a small update on what we've been doing with Death and Taxes. We've continuously strived to get Death and Taxes localized to other languages, and so far it's been going quite well! Recently we've added Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese into the game, and these languages how now received a new round of playtesting, editing and rewrites, increasing the quality of the translations. In addition, I fixed some smaller bugs related to text rendering, with text being cut off in some places. Last but not least, I reworked the credits scene after you finish the game, adding the people who have worked on the translations and also making it a bit prettier! Our next steps is to translate Death and Taxes to Korean and Japanese, and so far they are 12% and 31% done respectively. Stay tuned for more updates on this :) There is also a community effort to translate the game to Ukranian, and it's already been done as far as 2% ^_^ Spanish translation is also coming along strong at 77%. So, I hope y'all enjoy the Spring Sale and if you haven't yet, do considering buying Death and Taxes, it would support us immensely to bring new games to you (watch out for an announcement about a new project in this space very soon!). If you have any feedback for us, feel free to share it with us here on Steam or on our Discord! Much love, -Death and Taxes

Join the influencers as Grim.

Hi Grims! We are pleased to say that we have been chosen to be part of the EAST MEETS WEST GAMES FEST! I have no idea if I should be writing that in caps, but even then, it's pretty cool so caps are okay I guess >_> I would like to take this moment to appreciate your continued interest in Death and Taxes! And a big thank you to our publisher Hawthorn Games for bringing the game to our Chinese-speaking audience! We have performed so well, and we're overjoyed at the response. Being included in the East Meets West festival is absolutely banger! Many thanks to you all and hello to any newcomers! We really hope you like our game ^_^ Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hawthorn Games' first anniversary coincides with the Steam Winter Sale. Therefore, we are now offering discounts on games we published and launching the 5th game recommendation jointly with DouYu, especially for Death and Taxes. There are lots of gifts including game discounts, CDKeys and merchandize. We are looking forward to your participation! Happy first Anniversary and wonderful holidays! Death and Taxes offerd at a historical low 70% discount during the Winter Sale. Experience the office life of the Grim Reaper for only $3.89 (12.9)! The game recommendation campaign will run from Dec. 25th to 31st. Several games published by Hawthorn Games will get reviews and recommendations. There are also ongoing lucky draw and live events during the campaign. More details: 5th game recommendation at Douyu!
The game recommendation campaign includes 1. Live stream of playing Death and Taxes! Watch Live to participate in the lucky draw that can get CDKeys and merchandize. Streamer will start on Dec. 25th Streamer will start on Dec. 31st 2. Game Review & Game Trial Review and trial of multiple games get started during the campaign! For more information: 5th game recommendation at Douyu. Apply for participation in the Game Review section. 3. Merchandize Lucky Draw in QQ Group To thank the players for their continuous support to our games, we will make Lucky Draw in QQ Group: 540300028(including theme folder, two different sizes of Mindset cards and official coloring book). Enter the group 540300028 and view the announcement to participate in the lucky draw! Best wishes from Hawthorn Games!

Good day, devoted Reapers! After more than one month of overtime working on the translation and localization of this game, 100,000+ words and 8,700+ items are all done! Thank you for your patience. (Thanks for asking, our working environment is cozier than the Death Office, because you know, we no longer use the fax machine - v -). While we've done LQA multiple times to make sure the quality, massive game script and severe constraints of time really hindered us to make it into perfect. So we will continue to optimize translations and localizations along the way. If you encounter any flaws in the text or bugs in the game, please join our Discord. Give us feedback or share your insights with other Grim peers! Anyway, we are happy to announce that the Simplified Chinese version of Death and Taxes is officially released today! Yes, today! Happy reaping! you fellow reapers!

Hello Grims! Oak here. Just wanted to let y'all know about the progress we've had with Turkish and Chinese localizations! We're happy to announce that the Turkish localization has been completed thanks to our diligent fans. It is available in our new update that you can grab on Steam right now! In addition, I'm happy to announce that we have partnered with Hawthorn Games to bring the game to the Chinese audience due to popular demand! Hopefully we will have more to share with you soon, but we aim to have the game finally available in Chinese in November already. Keep an eye on this space ^_^ As you may know, it's Steam Scream Fest right now, too! So to celebrate the occasion, you can find Death and Taxes at a smooth -70% off. And as is already custom for our posts, here's a bit of fan art from our community members for your viewing pleasure. Give them some love! Fate minding the news
Fate just being a hot dilf
by Riddlester (also on Instagram) Despondence, it seems like? Hm...
By SherlockonOpium ...and Lady Pawdington up to her usual shenanigans :|
By Stanley the Stanlet And that's it for now! Hope that you enjoyed this little update :3 Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hi Grims! Just wanted to let you know how things are going with our next game, Broken Alliance!! This style of game usually has two main layers, the adventure and the combat layer. In the adventure mode, you travel the world map, gathering resources, hiring creatures, building towns and in the combat part, well, you fight. Lately we've been working a lot with the combat section of the game, and earlier this year, we made a pretty big step of going for a deckbuilding style combat.
We haven't nailed down how it will work exactly yet, but day by day we're getting closer to figuring it out. We're also trying it out in the engine (which totally works)
ok maybe it doesn't totally work yet. BUT WE'RE GETTING THERE!
The goal this week is to have the combat in such a shape that we could show it off at a private demo event this weekend, and after that we want to work on a more public demo, something that y'all can try out yourselves, too ^_^ Also, we're going to be at Gamescom! And maybe we're going to have a playable demo of Broken Alliance there >_> ...only time will tell. So, if you like what you see, please do wishlist and follow to keep up with our progress! Till next time! Much love, -Oak

Hi Grims! It's Oak here, and today I'd like to give you an update on some changes about Death and Taxes, and some exciting news about our next game, too! First and foremost: the game should now be more stable, with less issues with getting a "black screen" on startup on some hardware. If it does still happen, please let me know! Secondly, we decided to make the game a bit more accessible to achievement hunters >_> We changed the way a certain achievement works, and without spoiling too much, it still triggers at the same time as before, but just with different (read: way more possible) conditions. You might know what I'm talking about if you've been around long enough <_< So that being said, we're still on our way with some localization projects, we will hopefully have a Chinese version coming this month or next! In addition, the Spanish localization effort is about 70% complete and the Turkish one is *nearly* done at 99%! Meanwhile we've been hard at work with our next game, Broken Alliance! We decided a while ago that we are going to try something interesting in the adventure-strategy genre, so we are going to have a deckbuilding element to the combat there. I also have a bit of concept art to share with you :3
Read more about Broken Alliance on its own page and don't forget to wishlist ^_^ And to end off, a big thank you to archie from our community for making Leene and I these wonderful Fate charms *_* Absolutely delightful.
And that's it for now! Thank you all for your time and I hope y'all have a great week :3 PS: don't forget that if you want some extra Death and Taxes relaxation, you can check out this COLORING BOOK if you didn't know it exists yet

Hi Grims! Oak here. Time for another big-ass sale (with a historical low of -70% off) and me showing off some really really neat stuff our community has been creating, inspired by Death and Taxes! BUT FIRST! I want to shout out our new game that we're working on, called Broken Alliance, where you have to play as one of four factions in a magical world which is about to implode to try and survive or prevent the coming cataclysm. If you've ever heard of game series like Age of Wonders, Master of Magic or Heroes of Might and Magic, then this is definitely something for you! If not, it will have our signature style of narrative heft, but more complex gameplay compared to Death and Taxes, so perhaps you would still be interested :3 But now, without further ado: behold the coolness The Art of Death - a massive collaborative project culminating in a 100-page fan-zine You can check it out RIGHT HERE, it's a 40 megabyte PDF so give it some time if it doesn't open immediately! A big big thank you to everyone involved again, it's just... freaking wild what our community does x_x Fate & OC by iinkhat
A Punch Above One's Fate by iinkhat Fate + Hawaiian Shirt by betelzebub (also our capsule image for the Summer Sale!)
That's it for the showcase... for now >_> If any of you are interested in showing off your Death and Taxes creations, do let me know on our Discord! Enjoy the summer everyone! And take care, wherever you may be ^_^ Much love, -Oak EDIT: OH ALSO WE MADE A COLORING BOOK FOR Y'ALL IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT YET ok that's all byeee

Hello Grims! Exciting news, we just released The Official Death and Taxes Coloring Book! You can download it HERE FOR FREE! Print it out or color it digitally, you choose! Features 9 pages of tasks with artwork by our concept artist Raido Kikas. Most illustrations are from the game but there are some never seen before pictures too!
If you want to share your colored pages with us and the community, you can join our discord! Other file formats (png, psd) are available there as well. Thanks for the attention and I hope you have fun with it! -Leene

Hi Grims! Oak here. Nice to soo you, if you're still reading these, after all these times, and if you're new, welcome! A few days ago we hit the two year mark with Death and Taxes. It's been a glorious time since then, and our community is still quite cozy (hopefully in the coming time we will have some more news to share on that part too!). So cozy in fact, that there was a group of people who worked together to make a 100-page fan... art... fic... zine? to commemorate the occasion. What in the what, I thought, having been steadily teased in our Discord server. I don't know what I was expecting, but this is beyond anything I imagined. It's a herculean effort of artistry and fandom spirit, and it's a wonderful read if you're into Death and Taxes. Because it is very much, Death and Taxes, basically more of it. A big thank you from us all to you. And thank you for the zine, it's extremely inspiring! Al, Liam, Tolp, Tad, sal, sam, Mich, Sketchy, Archie, Graham and Azumei, you've made something absolutely wonderful! And you, too, can find it, and read it on our Discord! Much love, Grims, and thank you for everything! -Oak

Hello Grims! Oak here. The test note Fate gives you on Day 4 now appears properly! Sorry for the inconvenience. Much love, -Death and Taxes

, Grims. Oak here! I'm happy to announce, that finally, we're releasing the Russian localization of Death and Taxes! What has been added is the Russian translation of all dialogues and profiles (some special in-game items remain untranslated, I hope you're OK with that!). The update is live RIGHT MEOW. If you update your game, it will be available. Here's how you can get it:
To celebrate, we're participating in the Halloween Sale being -60% off! That is all. Thank you everyone! ^_^ Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hello Grims! Oak here. We've got a right treat for y'all. As you may have seen, we're in a bundle with an amazing line-up of games! If you haven't checked it out yet, do take a look, there's a lot of fun and difficult choices to make waiting for you. And if you came here from the bundle - welcome to our lil' corner! Hope you like it :3 We're also -55% off for this week and other games in the bundle are also on sale, hopefully making it more affordable to you guys! So, whenever we have sales or any other sort of visibility boosting events on Steam or otherwise, I also like to ask our community on Discord for permission to show off their fanart! This time we had an open call for everyone who wants to show off their stuff, also including fanfics! Without further ado, here we go, and do show them some love if you enjoy their work!

Sam - tumblr - youtube

Mich - tumblr - instagram

Claudz - twitter - tumblr

sodafrog - twitter - tumblr

Alaka'i - twitter - instagram

Now that you've seen fanart, TIME FOR FANFIC:

Sketchy - ao3

Mich:

Hi Grims! Oak here again! Just wanted to let you all know that we're on sale for a week :3 And YES I do have some more fan art for you!
Fancy Fate by Sam
Good Frog Percy by Alaka'i (Percy is an OC Reaper by Tad)
Atro, an OC Reaper by Sam These wonderful fanart creations have spawned from our Discord! If you feel like you have something you would like to create or show off, whether it be fanfic, fanart or just some ideas about the Death and Taxes universe, feel free to join and share ^_^ ALSO, I have great news about the progress of the Russian localization of the game. 24000 words have already been translated and 64000 are yet remaining, so things are moving along. We should have a Russian version of the game launching later this year! And that's it for this time! Take care, Grims! Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hello Grims! It's that time of the year again (it's been HOT down here in Estonia let me tell you). We're happy to celebrate the summer with you with a -50% discount ^_^ We've been working on some localization stuff for Death and Taxes and we can at this point say that Death and Taxes will hopefully be localized to Russian this year! I'll keep you posted on that. And when we're not dealing with localization, we're ticking away at our new project. Hopefully I'll have more to say about that soon, too. But without further ado, enjoy some fine creations by our community members over at our Discord!
Beach Day Fate by Tad
Spawn #1348 by Alaka'i
OC Reapers by Tad
*soft moan* by Shiny Bishie That's all for now! Much love <3 -Death and Taxes

Hello Grims! Oak here. I've decided to call it with a certain issue we have on some specific hardware configurations for some people and just create a fallback solution. I just want people to be able to play x_x If you have had problems with the main menu of the game having a black screen (i.e. the background videos don't load) and inability to load intot a game, then this should be fixed now. If the video fails to load you should now see a static background image and the game should work properly when you go to the Options screen or load a game or create a new game. There is still a slight delay when you load into a game, which might feel a bit counter-intuitive, but at least it should work in all cases now ^_^ Let me know if you still have this issue! But yeah, hopefully this is fixed now. And as has kinda become tradition already, I will post some neat fanart from our Discord!
Chicken & pineapple pizza anyone? Made by Ya Boi.
Fate being completely done with Grim's antics by Sal.
Spawn One (the one that got shot into the sun) by Alaka'i
Fate being his usual cheery self by Mich
Fate and Grim enjoying a fine party by Tad

Hey Grims! Oak here again. We're very excited to be on the front page of Steam today! I hope you're all having a great day, wherever or whenever you may be :) So yeah.. Hi! Hello to everyone new and hello to everyone who's already been with us. To those who are new here, Death and Taxes is a satirical take on an age-old character. You are the Grim Reaper... on an office job. That's pretty much it! Give the game a try if that sounds intriguing to you ^_^ I don't have too much to tell you other than how thankful we are for your continuous involvement in our community! The game is still growing, bit by bit. That shows in our Discord, right here on Steam and also in our sale numbers! We've officially crossed 100 000 copies sold! Holy macaroni. Thank you all for supporting us <3 Although we're not actively working on Death and Taxes anymore, we do want to keep up localization efforts. More about that in the near future. But new stuff is on the horizon! Most of our time right now is going into a new not-fully-announced-but-kinda-is project, Here's a teaser from our resident concept artist Raido
When we have more to say about the project I'll be sure to let you know :) In the meanwhile, you are more than welcome to have a guess at what we're working on. But enough about that! Here's some new fan art!
By an_apowell
By RAzcake

By persimmonpollywog Hope you enjoyed some of these awesome creations by our fans ^_^ Be seeing you, Grims! Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hi Grims! Oak here, with a quick update. I've fixed an issue where piglets get stuck on the desk instead of going into the drawer when you put the oink bank into either drawer in the desk. A tiny fix, but much requested to be fixed. And while I have your attention, here's some neat fan-art from our community! Follow them on Twitter and give 'em some love <3



Hope you all are doing well! Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hello Grims! Oak here, with some good news! We're in the LudoNarraCon 2021 lineup as alumni, and this means we're going to be on sale with -50% off till May 1st! ^_^ Check out the whole event here Additionally, our lead narrative grump Mrten Rattasepp will be joining a panel, called "Good Stories Must Die"
If you're interested in the development of narrative-focused games, definitely attend the talk at the LudoNarraCon Steam page at 10am PST *today* on 24th of April and listen to what all these story-weaving boffins have to say! Thanks for hanging around! That's it from me :3 Header art by the talented ALAKA'I from our Discord! <3 Much love, -Death and Taxes PS: Thank you so much for the lovely reception of the game recently! 95% positive *_* You do us a great honour. Truly appreciated!

Greetings, Grims! Oak here, just popping in to say hello! We're starting a sale, putting Death and Taxes off 50% for a week. I would also like to extend my own and the team's gratitude towards everyone who helped make IWOCon 2021 a possibility, and also a big, big thank you to everyone who visited our booth there! I've seen a bit of an increase in traffic both here and in our Discord (come say hi :3) and it's lovely to see! And also much love for all the glowing reviews you've left recently! <3 Very happy to see that even after such a long time you're all still enjoying the game :3 Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hey Grims! Oak here. I'm happy to announce that Death and Taxes has been selected into the lineup of IWOCon 2021! It's a completely independent virtual indie game expo spearheaded by beloved community members in the indie game dev scene. We have a booth at Love Islands. Once you tarvel to Love Islands, we're directly left (you have to cross a few bridges to get there :3 ).
Overall, I encourage you to check it out, it's a neat experience and there are a lot of cool indie games being shown off. Much love, -Death and Taxes

Okay, uhh. Hi. Oak here. Hi grims. I have some explaining to do. So y'all know that Fate is an absolute stud of a herculean exemplar, and we decided to commission a body pillow. Yeah. Yep. Wheew. I love it though. And well, y'all did ask for it (if you didn't ask for it, SORRY BUT IT'S HAPPENING ANYWAY). We do have consolation prizes, so, do check it out regardless! All you gotta do is just CLICK THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF THIS LINK and do the things that the nice giveaway machine asks you to. You don't have to do all of them of course. Or any of them for that matter! BUT IT'S A FREAKING (nearly) LIFE-SIZE BODY PILLOW >_>
And there's only one of them for now. Well, that's it! Good luck with the raffle and thanks for sticking around for so far! Much love <3 -Death and Taxes

Hi Grims! Oak here. Our should I say.. Ol! We're thrilled to announce that we have our first community translation ready to be relased into the world, in Brazilian Portuguese!
I'd like to extend my utmost gratitude to Alec Santos who has spearheaded the entire thing and helped us out in so much more than just the translation. I think it's safe to say that this translation would not have happened without you, Alec, and we're eager to share your work with the world! We've also included a few bugfixes here and there, but nothing major to report. I would like to think that this is our most stable version of the game to date, BUT. But. In case it isn't, please feel free to post about bugs, glitches and issues in our community boards here or in our Discord! You can also join on-going community localization efforts if you would like. It's completely voluntary, and we really appreciate all the help we can get. Hopefully Brazilian Portugese is just the first of many additional languages to join the fray! We have tested the Brazilian Portugese build, and polished what we could see, but there are bound to be issues we haven't seen yet. If you do find any, don't hesitate to reach out and we'll do our best to fix them ^_^ And if not, yay! ALSO! To commemorate our inching closer to the 1 year date (5 days from now, on the 20th of February), we're throwing up a weeklong sale till 22nd February starting RIGHT MEOW. We're taking the game to a historic -50% off, which I hope can convince y'all to take the plunge... and become a Grim Reaper. Every copy you buy goes straight to the people involved in making the game! ^_^ That's it for now. But there will be more! We are looking to host a giveaway to commemorate the joyous occasion with some never-before-seen merchandise and we also have some more exciting news to share going into the weekend. Stay tuned! Like? Subscribe? Follow? I'M NOT SURE. ANYWAY, I'M RAMBLING AGAIN. As always... much love! <3 -Death and Taxes PS: Header art is by Janitor from our Discord. Check out their tumblr!

-Fixed proc of Desk Jockey achievement - now properly ignores Piglets from Oink Bank and Desk Spirits

Hello Grims! Oak here. Time to party ^_^ Even though last year was a dumpster fire of a shitshow, we still had many fun moments and took what we could from any weird or unusual situation (which happens daily, lol). This includes having a wonderful time being inteviewed by Estonian gaming outletlevel1.ee and bestowed the Best Estonian Game of 2020 award for their annual award show(this is mostly in Estonian so, uhh... good luck?) Oh, yeah! Death and Taxes is an Estonian game:) Maybe some other games you know are made by Estonians or in Estonia!In fact, there's a really goodCurator page for Estonian Games right hereon Steam! Best check it out.
Here's a fancy graphic for us to show off now :3 So, you might be thinking what the big deal is with this. Well truth be told, there actually isn't a "big deal" per se. Yet. Most of the work put into Death and Taxes came from Estonia and we're just a fledgling start of an industry around here. The thing to rememberwith giving this sort of an award is that there is not too much competition. But that's been slowly changing. There is actual competition now, as both the level of local developers and number of active gamedevs has been slowly, but steadily increasing, leading to multiple titles released per year, and in quality that is good enough to attract a sizeable audience. And hopefully this trend will continue. Concluding from that... I'm not just happy to have received an award from our local community. I'm happy that this sort of award actually exists in the first place. This gives me hope for the future when it comes to fellow gamedevs around the area. I can't wait to see what's next from our compatriots and likewise, I can't wait to share with you what we'll be working on going forward :3 Thanks for sticking around! If you want to get in touch or want to see what we're going to be working on live, come join our Discord! Yot Much love, -Placeholder Gameworks PS: haha yes i'm gonna sign off as Placeholder Gameworks now because WE'RE GONNA MAKE MORE GAMES OTHER THAN DEATH AND TAXES mwahahaha <3

Hi Grims! Good season's tidings to you all! The holiday season is upon us and thus, also a corresponding sale. We're an historic -45% off until 5th January, so if you like it, have played it elsewhere and want to support us: buy Death and Taxes! And/Or send it as a gift to a friend :) Ironically, for this Christmas, we have for you the Halloween Update on the Nintendo Switch! If you have Death and Taxes on the Switch, you just need to update. If you want to play on the Switch, then now is a great time to get it! Thank you for being here with us so far into the year. It's already been 10 months since release, but we're still going strong! It's nice to see y'all interacting with us and hanging around in our Discord :3 Also! The Steam Game Awards are now open for final round of voting. We didn't make it (we didn't expect to either :D ), but we did get an exceptional amount of reviews from you all. Some absolutely magical to read. Thank you for all your kind words of support, encouragement and acknowledgement <3 We wouldn't be here without you, and I'm glad it's all turned out the way it has with our game and our community ^_^ That's it from me this time. It won't be the last post of the year, don't worry, I'll still have a few things to say further down the holidays. See you then, Oak out. Much love, -Death and Taxes

Okay so in another turn of unexpected events, here we are. Death and Taxes is in the running for IndieDB's Indie of the Year! Want to support us? You can actually vote for us ^_^
Check it out here: https://www.indiedb.com/groups/2020-indie-of-the-year-awards/top100#vote72413 We're under the "Realistic Sim" category (who said that being a Grim Reaper isn't a real job!?) right down in the bottom. If you have a few seconds of your time and a few bits of your bandwidth, I will absolutely appreciate any vote you throw our way :3 I mean... hell. Y'all got us this far! <3 That's it from me for now, Oak out! Header art by ALAKA'I from our Discord! <3 Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hi everyone! Oak here. So things have happened lately! I woke up to this:

THANK YOU SO SO MUCH <3 <3 <3

Heya Grims, Oak here. So, I think we've finally arrived at a reasonable place with the stability of the update. Feel free to grab version 1.2.5 from here and enjoy the new content, now hopefully bug-free! And if you haven't decided to grab it just yet, we're still -40% off till the 16th of November. Fixed in 1.2.5:

• Day 28 doesn't end in the very rare case that you talk to Mortimer in the Bar right after you've faxed away the profiles for the day
• Dialogue screen doesn't show your own appearance randomly when exiting dialogue

Oak here!Lets cut to the chase: we're happy to announce that we've released the long-awaited Halloween Update for Death & Taxes! Go to your Steam Library RIGHT MEOW and grab the update! [Hotfix changelog at the bottom of this post] To commemorate this momentuous occasion, Death and Taxes will be -40% off for the duration of the Halloween Sale! PLUS, we are extending this sale until the 16th of November! We felt like this is only fair due to you folks who are still on the fence and might not be able to afford it right during Halloween <3 And do check out the Bundle of Consequences if you like games such as Death and Taxes because we're in damn fine company there! What you can expect in the update:

• Unlocked the Cerberus' DenBar area in Fately Towers! (Open on weekends after work hours)
• 7 new characters to meet in Cerberus' Den
• A whopping 16 spirits to imbibe (including milk for calcium)
• Over 50 new character profiles to discover
• 2 brand new visages, one spookier than the other
• 6 new articles of clothing to reap with in style
• Spooky new desk friends to discover!
• New music to chill to when hanging out with fellow Grims and others
• 10 new achievements to hunt down!

This is Halloween, EVERYBODY MAKE A SCENE! <3

• Fixed one of Mortimer's lines not activating
• Fixed Ra head not appearing.
• Changed the Bar to work so that patrons don't disappear but rather disable when their dialogue ends
• Fixed Herbert's (Plant Reaper) dialogue from cutting off suddenly
• Fixed Bar Quiz duplicate questions
• Fixed Bartender appearing in a very strange location at the end of the game

Hi everyone! Oak here again! ^_^ First off I want to extend my thanks to our wonderful cast of voice actors who will be playing the roles in our Halloween Update. I absolutely adore all of your work and you truly have done justice to the characters and I can't wait to share the fruits of your labour with all our players! Without further ado, meet the denizens of Cerberus' Den! Abigail Turner as Cerri, the Bartender!
Michael Malconian as Gus, the Ghost Janitor
Jacob Williamson as the Archivist, Keeper of the Abysmal Archive
Jimmie Yamaguchi as Florian, the Arrogant Reaper
Stephanie Novak as Spawn #114, the Nihilistic Reaper
Gregory Holgate as FRANK WHITTLE, the Anxious Reaper
Olly Thorn as Herbert, the Plant Reaper
And last but not least, reprising his role as Mortimer, the ??????: Isaak Wells!
We're still working to finalize everything for the update and HOPEFULLY WE WILL HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO TEST IT PROPERLY FOR Y'ALL but here we are! Tune in here around 20:00 CET on 29th October and you can meet the various characters in Cerberus' Den (after downloading the updated version of course, haha). And that's it. Don't want to spoil you too much :) Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hello Grims! It's Oak here, and I come to with absolutely EPIC NEWS. Together with Do Not Feed The Monkeys, Headliner: NoviNews, Not Tonight and Papers, Please, we've formed a 5-game mega-bundle of choice-driven and narrative-focused games. This bundle will run for 3 months, ending January 2021, so you have plenty of time to make your mind whether to get this or not! You probably have a game or two from this bundle already, but if you're feeling adventurous, I can heartily recommend any of the other games! We all banded together with seeing both the similarities and the differences in each-others games and want to get you on board each-others, er, boats? Or however the saying goes. You can check out the bundle right here: CLICK ME, I'M A BUNDLE Give all these fine folks some love! ^_^ And if you're someone coming over from some of the other games in the bundle, HELLO! I hope you have a good time! Join us on our Discord if you wanna hang out and talk! That's it for today! Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hi y'all! Oak here again ^_^ Just wanted to let you know, that we're hosting another Death and Taxes Merch Raffle! Sign up here! It runs until the 17th of September, 19:00 CET. After that we will choose 10 lucky grims who will win an awesome piece of merchandise from our merch store :3 Good luck, and may Fate be on your side! Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hello Grims of the worlds! Oak here, with a MIND-BLOWING announcement: Death and Taxes is now available on the Nintendo Switch! If you have a Switch JUST GRAB IT ALREADY X_X I'm super-mega-hyper-happy about how everything has turned out with it and I hope you all feel the same. I cannot say enough about how thankful I am to the crew at Pineapple Works who took care of getting the game onto Switch. It's been an absolute blast to see your enthusiasm shared with us, as well ^_^ Now to the (other) good part! We're hosting a raffle to commemorate this epic release, and again, we will be choosing 10 lucky Grims to get a piece of Death and Taxes merch designed by Leene (our creative director and art lead and overall awesome person). Check out the raffle right here!
And that's it for now :3 Go play! Tell your friendssssdfasfngfkjnsdkngfjkdsnkkdnsdjk I'm so happy ^_^ Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hello Grims! Just wanted to let you know that we're on sale for a few days (till the 10th!) sooooooo... tell your friends! ^_^ ALSO; BIG NEWS ON THURSDAY!!! Stay tuned :3 And a big shoutout to Alaka'i from our Discord server for the featured artwork! <3 Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hey everyone! Oak here again. As promised, here's the raffle! https://gleam.io/BP1P4/death-and-taxes-merch-raffle This one is special in that you can enter with your Steam account and if you've clocked at least 2 hours in Death and Taxes you can unlock even MORE tickets for the chance to win some Grim Merch ^_^
The raffle will end at 31st August, 19:00 CET and we will contact the winners shortly after that :) Much love and good luck! -Death and Taxes

Hello again Grims! For our final event at Gamescom's Indie Arena Booth, we have the creative lead of Death and Taxes showing off how the art gets made for the game. As you may have seen, we're planning a content update for Halloween this year, and new art is at the forefront. So.. if you're interested, head over to Leene's Twitch channel at 19:00 CEST on Saturday, August 29th! Hope to see you there :) Much love, -Death and Taxes

Heyo, Grims! Have you ever wanted to get some Death and Taxes memorabilia? Now's your chance. We're hosting a giveaway on Twitter, starting 19:00 CEST Friday 28th, running 3 days. All info will be posted there once the event starts :) 10 lucky Grims will be chosen to receive the ULTIMATE MERCH.
Much love, -Death and Taxes

Greetings, Grims! Gamescom is starting really really really soon. We have a few cozy events planned for you, and we hope to see you all there! You are more than welcome to join us at the booth for some fun times chatting about the game or anything, really. If you haven't yet, be sure to register a guest account for the Indie Arena Booth (it's free and you get to see tons of cool indies if you do) and join our Discord :3 Our kickoff event will start at 27th August at 19:00 CEST, and will go on for around 4 hours, but we're not really strict with the time, if people want to hang out more then that's perfectly OK :) Take care and see you soon! Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hello Grims! Oak here. We got accepted to the Indie Arena Booth at Gamescom this year (I'm very happy about that X_X) and we have quite the line-up of stuff for the event. Make sure to join our Discord! And just to get this out of the way: We are planning to get Death and Taxes on the Nintendo Switch very very soon, we will announce something super special about that on the 28th (that's a Friday), so if you're a console aficionado, watch this space!(Pretty please? ^_^')
27th August 19:00 CET: Booth Opening Party @ Discord! Come join us for a nice & chill chat session on Discord. Ask us anything ^_^ 28th August 19:00 CET: Merch Giveaway @ Twitter! Yep! We have merch again. Check out the line-up of stuff that you can order on Redbubble! And go spam us on Twitter to win some for free. Instructions coming soon (FOLLOW US ON TWITTER TO GET THE LATEST WHATS-WHAT >_>). 29th August 19:00 CET: Leene D&T Live Art Stream @ Twitch! Come check out Leene work on some AMAZEBALLS assets for the upcoming Death and Taxescontent update :3 Meanwhile, work on the upcoming Halloween Content Patch/free DLC/Wedontevenknowyet is progressing quite well. Coding-wise there's not much to do (hahahaha actually there's so much, don't trust what programmers tell you, ever)besides a lot of behind-the-scenes work and making drinks appear and disappear properly, you know, the usual. The Cerberus Den is not the most... alive place in the world, but it gets its fair share of guests. ...like a Grim from the Plant Department, for example:
Again showcasing the wonderful work that our concept artist Raido is doing :3 It's always a pleasure to see our awesome designs come to life and even more of a pleasure for me to put them in the game once they're done! I'm quite hyped for the update, it's not the most massive thing in the world, but hey, at least there'll be a cozy bar to hang out in :) We hope to see you all soon on our Discord and Twitch channels! Also! If you'd like Death and Taxes to be translated to your native language, we're still running a community translation effort for it. I will post more about it in the coming days/weeks, reminding people that YES WE'RE STILL DOING IT and it's actually progressing fairly well! If you're interested in that, then do check out our Discord and request us for the Localizer role ^_^ Much love! -Death and Taxes

Hi Grims! Oak here. If you missed out on the Steam Summer Sale, don't fret! We're -33% off again, for this week ^_^ Otherwise, I hope you're all enjoying summer, or the equivalent season in your respective area (it's summer for us here in Estonia!) :3 We're in half-work-half-vacation mode right now. We went to see a castle for next year's Castle Game Jam, scouted out the grounds and took some footage. There was a lot of memeing. Oh, and, as said we're also in Estonia! Again. For a while. We're trying to settle some business here and then we're going to return to Sweden into our cosy room at Spelkollektivet. So what's new with Death and Taxes? We had a meeting to nail down some more of the tasks required for our upcoming content patch, slated for release this Halloween. And now we're focusing on that more and more, meaning that we're going to try and get that done as soon as possible! So we have plenty of time to iron out any issues and get to the level of quality we're happy with. Here's a little peek at the new Bar area we're making :3
Will you have the ear of the Bartender? What other patrons could there be? AND WHO IS SENDING ALL THOSE HECKING RED PROFILES? All while that's been going on, we've been accepted to the lineup of this year's Gamescom Indie Arena Booth! Make sure to check out all of the awesome games in the lineup, lots of cool stuff to see. Leene is hard at work putting lots of love and effort into our (totally awesome)virtual booth. We might share some teasers later on from that, too! And that's it for now!Stay tuned to find out more ^_^ Much love -Death and Taxes

Hi Grims! Oak here. Steam Summer Sale is happening and I'm pretty glad to be there the first time with Death and Taxes. After releasing in February, the blazing heat is a welcome change. Well, sorta. It's so hot. We can only really work from the basement, where I am writing this post right now. Funky. Also you know what else is funky? Our new header image. In any case, I hope y'all shop responsibly and get a lot of good games that you've been looking forward to! I will get a few that I've kept my eye on, too. We're still working on localization with our community, which is going quite nicely! And hopefully we will have more to share soon about our upcoming content patch (still planned for Halloween!) as well. Meanwhile, enjoy the summertime (if it is summer for you, otherwise, enjoy your respective season!) and stay grim! Much love, -Death and Taxes PS: A big thank you to our lovely Alaka'i from our Discord server for the artwork featured in the capsule! <3

Hi guys! Oak here. We're happy to announce that as of.. well.. NOW, the Death and Taxes Official Soundtrack has been released! You can find it here, or alternatively if you buy the game or already own it, you are already eligible for it with no extra charge! Just search for Death and Taxes Soundtrack in your Steam Library and you're good to go ^_^ It includes the MP3 versions that you hear in the game, and also uncompressed high-quality WAV files for your audiophilic pleasures :3 We're topping this off with a -30% sale for the base game, our deepest discount yet, and we're going to be on the Weeklong Deal starting from today until June 8th! Meanwhile, the soundtrack will have a -25% discount for the launch. Thank you all for cheering us on and I hope you have good memories from the awesome soundtrack by our main sound boi: Adam Bow! Stay Grim! -Oak

Hi Grims! It's been fairly quiet on our front as of late, as we've been focusing more on the (inevitable) bureaucracy and paperwork that results after releasing a game. Good paperwork, naturally. But still, paperwork. I digress. I'm here to talk about MUSIC. In fact, we are having a slight update to the release! I've talked about this many times before, but it hasn't materialized yet because of various reasons (mostly priority compared to other things). Without further fanfare: we're releasing the soundtrack! Both in MP3 and WAV (high-quality) formats. If all things line up, we will have this release on June 1st. We will also pair that with a discount for the game, so stay tuned! ^_^ Everyone who has bought the game or will buy it in the future will have the soundtrack. It will automatically download to your game install folder. If you haven't bought the game, and just want the soundtrack, you can buy that separately as well! And furthermore, for those of you who have been following us on Discord more actively, you'll know that we're working on localization. Since, sadly, we can't afford to do a full localization, but we have established a community effort to try and get the game translated. It's a pretty big undertaking with over 70000 words. If you want to help us out with this, join us on our Discord and hit up either me (Oakwarrior) or Leene and we'll get you settled in :) All of the people who help out will be credited in the game, of course! There is no need to feel pressured to do anything, though. You all have supported us way enough already! That's it for now. Stay tuned for the imminent release of the soundtrack! And stay safe, everyone! See you all in a couple of days. More info on everything will be made available then ^_^

Hi everyone! Oak here. Everything is a blur because things happened so fast and it's a bit hard to catch up, but here we are! Death and Taxes is part of the LudoNarraCon 2020's Choice and Consequence bundle! As always, stay Grim! Check us out if you haven't yet, and do take a gander on the rest of the games too. If you already own Death & Taxes in the bundle, it will be cheaper to get the rest of the games, too! Header art by ALAKA'I from our Discord! <3

Hi fellow Grims! Oak here. So we're off to an interesting month. Or life in general. But fret not, dear friends, colleagues and Grims - this too shall pass. I hope you're all safe and sound, and that you are finding solace in games like I am. But enough of that. What's been up with Death and Taxes lately? Well, we're still doing stuff! We're currently in talks still with a publisher about potential porting of the game to the Nintendo Switch and also about translation possibilities. We are already underway with translating it to Traditional Chinese, thanks to a lovely group of people who approached us with an idea to do so. I've mentioned this a couple of times before, but since then, some more steps have materialized and this plan is actually being executed now! In other news, since it's spring, and as it is the season of life, there is also a good excuse to have a sale! That means Death and Taxes is -25% off right now until the 20th of April! Grab it if you haven't yet, and tell your friends. Additionally, yesterday, I wrote a ginormous post (part 2) about why we decided to have a demo for Death and Taxes in the first place, and why it's a good idea in our opinion to have free demos for games. If you're interested, head over to reddit to read the post! Leene and I are otherwise currently busy at work, mostly figuring out what to do next, with Death and Taxes and generally. We've been doing some stuff and prototyping things to see where we could go. One of those ideas materialized at a recent game jam! You can check out a playthrough of that on YouTube. Aaaand I think that's it for now! I hope you're all okay and.. see you again soon! Much love, -Death and Taxes

Hi everyone. I'm Oak, and I did the coding for Death and Taxes, a game that released about a month ago. It was developed over the years by various people, but a final team of 10 people got the game out of the gate on 20th of February this year (2020, in case you have trouble remembering which year is it, like I do). One of my wishes, when joining the team, was to eventually release the entire codebase of the game as open source. Which I'm doing today, and you can find it on github [link]. By now you're probably thinking: why? So... Why? Why indeed...
Ever since I started coding, I have absolutely loved open source stuff. I realize that releasing *only* the codebase is not exactly true in verbatim to the principles of FOSS stuff, but this is a deliberate decision. Making the code open source is fine by us, but making the art and other such assets is not. I won't go too much into detail to avoid opening a weird legal/ethical/whatever can of worms. That being said - we're not afraid that people would copy the game or whatnot. The game has already been made, is shipped, has sold pretty well (26k copies at time of writing! Woop! THANK YOU <3) and hell.. if you're inspired by it... go for it! Make games! MAKE ALL THE GAMES! And make them well. We need more good games that respect our players' time, capability and intelligence. When I was learning how to "maek gaem", resources were few and far in-between. Most of my experience came from being able to learn from my coworkers and having a diligent presence online, assimilating knowledge where I could. Bear in mind that I've mostly done coding, and this is what I focused on at the time. Resources which I sorely missed were concrete, specific and (most importantly) helpful examples of real-world applications of coding principles, workarounds, hacks, engine-specific behaviour, et cetera. The most helpful places were, for example, the Unity Answer Hub, Stack Overflow, the Unreal Developers' Network... they all, at best, offered a window to see how people actually implement stuff. I am a firm believer that it is usually more efficient to learn from the mistakes of others, rather than just people having to make the same mistakes over and over again due to lack of reliable information. And this leads me to the (incredibly winding and convoluted, sorry) answer to why we're releasing the source code for our game. I want to provide something that people can learn from. Including myself. The code for Death and Taxes is by NO MEANS clean or even "good" (depends on what your standard is). But the most important thing is that the code worked. The game shipped, and the game worked. The code is far from perfect, the game is far from perfect, but I hope that it's an example that people can go through and have even just a little bit of an insight into what goes into making a game. Hopefully it helps. Good luck, and have fun!

Hi everyone! Oak reporting in. So the first week has been a DOOZY. We've been doing pretty well, mostly in bug-fix mode and just trying to handle the communication from the release. It's been hectic, to say the least. We've fixed most of the bugs with the release, and now v1.1.7 should be really, really stable. We've had some issues with people losing progress, but this hole has now been plugged and hopefully the issue will not rear its ugly head again. And the reception.. has been amazing. We've been doing much much better than we could have ever expected and the reviews here have been so inspiring to read. We've even been blessed to have actually constructive negative reviews, which is a plus! Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to write what they feel about the game! It's very rewarding to see... more than I can say. Thank you. In addition, we've found and fixed some issues with missing/incorrect VO files and some platform specific issues. You have my eternal gratitude for being patient with us, and most importantly: thank you for reporting all the issues! It has helped me fix everything much faster than usual. I literally couldn't have done it without the help of the community here. As for what's next for Death and Taxes? Well, we are considering localization! We also wish to port it over to Switch, if possible, so we're looking at what our options are in that regard. We already have a Traditional Chinese and German description on our Steam page, and if things go well, we will test out how localization works out for us quite soon :) For now, that's it from me ^_^ Make sure to check out the sale if you're still on the fence about buying Death and Taxes. Next week I will probably talk about how we've performed and how our stats look! Spoiler: it's looking pretty good. Much love! Death and Taxes PS: Banner is fan art by our community member Foxton <3

Attention all Grims! Death and Taxes is now available to purchase! After months, years, of hard work and toil, we are finally here. I only have one thing to say.

Thank you.

Thank you for everyone who has supported us in any way, for playing our game, for loving it, hating it, everything! We are extremely lucky to have such a wonderful community! I hope you will all enjoy the game!

If you want to join the devs at their release party, we're streaming it live from Spelkollektivet! Come have a chat! ^_^

Hi everyone! Leene here this time :) The game that I dreamed of in 2017 is now ready for its release. ONLY 10 HOURS and it is out there! Warning: all of this might sound a bit cheesy and overly positive but I just had to share my thoughts.
In short: This has been an amazing journey, I want to say Thank you! to everybody who has been a part of it! It has been a lot of work making the game but it has been totally worth it.

We will be live-streaming our launch (complete with pushing the button and everything) on the Spelkollektivet (the house we're living in) Twitch stream, starting from 19:00 CET! Check it out here! Come join us to see what other people in the house are doing and how we freak out about trying to push the Release button ;)

Finally, the utmost gratitude for all the players and fans, you are the ones who really make the stories by playing the game. :)

Hello Grims! Oak here...

We're just a week away from release! And it's about time that we finally announce the release price for the game! We will be launching at $12.99/11.99/10.99!

Hey Grims! Oak here. So the last week has been pretty hectic. SO hectic in fact, that I forgot to do the regular Wednesday blog post. Oops! So where are we with the project? We're just about to finish all the stuff! We just have the voice-over for all the characters to go and then we need to do a round of balancing and finish up the ending sequence. And then just polish as much as we can, haha. Ha. Aaaaaaa.... Yeah it's fun. We've had some great things happen, we had a pretty big video by jacksepticeye (a pretty well-known YouTuber), which you can check out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA9vsyPRncY Loved his playthrough! And hopefully he'll play some more of it! Our original dream, or rather, Leene's original dream, was for Markiplier to make a video of the game. This might mean that we're one step closer to doing so? Leene said she'd break down crying if that happens (because she's a huge Markiplier fan). And, well, so am I. So I dunno, if you have nothing better to do, then you all could just tell Markiplier to check his e-mail inbox for the preview key we sent him? :D Leene also made a nice infographic of the "DnD alignment" of the bigger YouTubers we've had playing our game and it checks out lol
The goal is to get Markiplier on board so we can fill out the Lawful Good section (he's such a sweetheart!) That being said, there's still work to do. We're adding some fidelity to our ending sequences, like this one:
This is just a meme though >_> I don't want to spoil any of the endings, so you'll have to see what happens for yourself in the full release! Ooh, and we did get our Shopkeeper voice-over implemented! ALL OF IIIIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8MoJZjULeE That's it for today. URGHHH. Wish us luck! And stay grim! Much love! Death and Taxes

Hello peeps! Oak here! As chief memelord and coder extraordinaire, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about our Twitch integration. I implemented a way for Twitch streamers to interact with their audiences in Death and Taxes, which involves a few checkboxes and a really neat little book. QUICK REMINDER. We're going to be launching IN A MONTH (less than 30 days), so if you haven't wishlisted us on Steam yet, do so now! Then you'll get notified when we release :3 You can conveniently enable Twitch integration in the Options menu!
After that you can click on the book to vote! And when that's done, viewers can post messages in the chat to express their desire. You can also find us on Twitch when you're setting up your stream, as we have our very own category! In action, all of it looks something like this:
If you're interested in getting your Twitch playthrough of Death and Taxes featured on our Steam Store page, then let us know in the community boards here on Steam! We thought it'd be a fun way to just give content creators a chance to bring their audience into the game with them. All of this is completely optional, of course. This feature was something that we had been discussing mostly "as a joke" last summer, but the more we talked about it the more sense it made. Eventually, we laid down some facts on how we could use it, prototyped it, did some very basic UX design for it, and then Leene produced dedicated art assets to give it a polished and in-world look. We didn't want to sacrifice immersion for the sake of having a "gimmick" (so to speak). We're quite pedantic when it comes to worldbuilding, and I think in this case it played out in our favour.

So how did we actually do this?

• Go tohttps://github.com/TwitchLib/TwitchLib.Unityand download the DLL there, the latest on at time of writing is 1.0.0:https://github.com/TwitchLib/TwitchLib.Unity/releases/tag/1.0.0(TwitchLib.Unity.dll)
• Import the DLL into your Unity project (literally just drop it somewhere in your Plugins folder)
• Set up Twitch credentials so that you'd have a bot who does all the heavy lifting for you (reading chat messages, essentially)
• Create a class that manages your Twitch connection
• That's it.

• Check if a vote is in progress (clicking on the book starts a vote)
• Check whether the message contains the phrase that counts as a vote (which can be customized in the options menu) - and yes, I do realize that if you'd write both phrases into a single message then sparing someone would take the vote, but I'm writing code for cool people, not for trolls
• If there is a "vote phrase" in the message, register the vote
• If a vote by an user was already registered, replace it with the new vote (no multi-voting so spamming won't work)
• Update the visuals!

Another Wednesday, another blog post! This one is written by Leene and Oak together :) (AWW SHUCKS <3) We've been putting off making our gameplay trailer for a while just because we didn't have a lot of our gameplay scenes and sequences fully implemented. Having done some extensive research and looking at other games, both similar and dissimilar, showed that trailers almost exclusively focus on action. Trailers are an important part of Indie Game Marketing. But it might be a bit difficult to make one if you dont have an action-based game with lot of flashy onscreen movement. Death and Taxes is a narrative-heavy-story-based-game (what is UP with those HYPHENS omg) and relies heavily on text and the players' imaginations, this is why we had to take a more creative way to show our gameplay. The gameplay of our game is fairly hard to understand without playing it yourself and there is a lot that is left to the imagination when you first see it.
We've seen some trailers on Twitter/YouTube that are quirky, funny and endearing (such as Frog Detective; Papers, Please also pops to mind), so we thought that trying to compete with games that translate to trailers super-well in a natural manner was an uphill struggle. We knew that we wanted to make something that isnt just an advertisement for the game but gives something (amusement?) to the viewer, even if they wouldnt want to try out the game itself. We also wanted to make something that's still memorable and fast-paced but lacks explosions or any other traditional (or even campy?) trailer techniques. What we came up with is what you see in the video.
What we used:

• Eye-catching start to hook the viewer
• Quick-cut montage for pacing (kind of a youtube meme montage)
• Jokes
• A friendly soundtrack contrasting the grim content (visual contrasts as well)
• Music-synced montage to convey on-screen movement better (also, SO SATISFYING)
• Showed every single thing that moves in the game (since there aren't a lot)
• Full voice-over by the voice actor who we have casted in our game as well
• Informative sections also attempting to convey player emotion while playing

Leene here, this time talking a bit more about the visuals of Death and Taxes :) Firstly I want to say how excited I am for the release! We're almost there, only one and a half months to go!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAA!!! Ok got that out of the way... Now to the topic of visual design for the game world:

RETRO STYLE

• Inventing a new visual style for your game (a really experimental and hard way, hit or miss. One can argue that inventing something new is impossible, everything in this world is a remix).
• Using a style from another games (usually this is used but wont make anything interesting, some people like getting what they are used to).
• Mixing up old styles that are not from the video game world originally. These techniques can be mixed as well and it is usually the way it is done.
• Some developers do this automatically without thinking about if longer and stumble on something good but I really think it is good to think about this topic thoroughly and increase your chances to make something that stands out and at least feels new.

Symbolism and Mythology

• All the interior design of the main building is in the style, including most of the items the player can find.
• The main font in the game is a retro typewriter font.
• There are intricate golden ornaments everywhere.

• Skulls -> Death (d'uh).
• Flowers for funerals and death - White lilies in the wallpaper design.
• We might add some coffins to the menu design too.

• The Raven and Morrigan from Irish mythology on the world's currency (we also have Crow/Raven cawks as sound effects).
• The Ankh symbolizes Life.
• You can choose to look like Anubis. (!)
• The cat has an Egyptian collar.

• The black-and-white with some popping colors. From the times when it was expensive to print many colors.
• Speech bubbles and comic book cutscenes.
• There are several in-game references to Batman characters. (I wont spoil them ;) )

Hello Grims! Oak here. A little oops happened in our scheduling so I'm posting our (THIS YEAR'S FIRST) devlog a bit later than intended. Much, much later >_> But it's still this week, so yay! This is our 5th consecutive devlog on Steam! And yes I do realize we missed a week inbetween, but it was the holidays, and we didn't have much to show... BUT ANYWAY

*fanfares blare*

Hello, ghouls!
It's finally time for the writer to write something to this devlog. So,I'm the lead writer for Death and Taxes, and I guess I have a few words about writing. Unfortunately, I have little original to say. If anyone wishes to become an author of any type - novels,(screen)plays, video games - it still generally revolves around the same banal truths that almost every author will note: 1) Read a lot, and diversify. If you wish to write genre fiction, it's fine to read other works in the genre, but you really should just be reading a wide variety of books and topics. Besides, integrating techniques and styles outside the useful (but too comfortable) genre tropes may come in handy. 2) Write constantly. A lot comes down to getting into the routine of writing.One has to keep at it, every single day - when feeling good,motivated and inspired, when feeling bad and tired. At least get something down, even if it's not what you were supposed to write, but some sort of an experiment. There's always the fun of editing later! Honestly,for a more in-depth and helpful creation guide I'd at least recommend listening to the Start With This podcast: http://www.nightvalepresents.com/startwiththis Or checking out Brandon Sanderson's writing courses, available on YouTube. It's all about the toolkit! Writing is a craft, a skill to hone, not some sort of a magical innate ability granted upon you by Higher Beings. Writing is a GRIND. You grind at it until your fingers and eyes bleed! Gamewriting is an interesting beast to tackle. Here I've got an example of how education matters - not "a specific education"; it's more a lesson on how you can't predict the future, and thus can't know what random things may suddenly come in useful down the line. I have a background in literary and cultural theory and, as such, I'm quite familiar with all that postmodern and poststructuralist theory- turns out, if you're already used to concepts like rhizomes and hypertexts and such, and have done a bunch of examinations of the inner frameworks of novels, learning a 'visual programming' text creation program like Articy Draft comes really dang quickly.
The way a game dialogue can grow like a rhizome (that you somehow try to control)... it's kinda like a practical application of initially far more abstract philosophical concepts. At the same time, you have an understanding of structures and restrictions. Writing in Draft clearly differs from writing in Word (or any other text program),because of how the blank page looks and feels - already this space structures text differently. Restriction are great for force you into being creative.
A dialogue in Draft is composed of fragments that fit a certain amount of text(you can enlarge any text box, but I'd recommend keeping it at some specifically chosen sizes, so you have a constant clear visual understanding of how much text any fragment contains). The fragmentary nature of the flow also creates its own rhythm. In a sense, it kinda ends up feeling more like theatre/screenplay writing instead of a novel.And... you finally get to export the dialogue into the game, which itself has a specific look and design for the dialogue engine/window... and you see that everything looks wrong. And then you give up and cry.
Until next time! Stay frosty! Grind those words out! - tshiifMrten

Hi fellow Grims! Leene here this time! I think it is time to tell you more about where the name of Death and Taxes came from.

Game names:

The progress:

Goes together with the logo or contrasts it [/olist] Secondly I made up some names for a grim reaper simulation game and asked some friends to do that as well. There were over 50 names at first and I went over them seeing if they fit into my categories. This is the longest list one of my really eager friend sent me :)

"Nothing is more certain than Death and Taxes."

So the name Death and Taxes fit almost all of my rules (except for 10 and 11). It also had the word death in it like I wanted. I had to make a difficult choice because there was ONE BIG PROBLEM with the name. It is a part of a saying (yay, his is a good thing!), but some other companies have it as well (oh no, this is not a good thing!). So I found out that there was a book, documentary, movie, restaurant, many usernames and even a law firm called Death and Taxes. At that time, there were no games named Death and Taxes and I decided that we can take the risk and hope that we will get enough popularity to show up in the search engines. A year after naming the game, Magic: The Gathering came out with a card pack called Death and Taxes and I knew that this could be a problem because now the name is in the virtual game market but at least it wasnt a name for the full game. For a long time, googling or youtube searching for Death and Taxes game only gave information about MTG, not our game but we were lucky enough to get more popularity and now all the first results in Google are about our own game(yay!) so everything turned out well in the end. So this is the story behind the name! Feel free to tell me if you have some own rules for naming games or want me to go deeper in some of the rules I mentioned. Thanks for reading! Leene

Hello hello! It's Oak again. Quick update on the demo situation: I fixed a small issue where the game wouldn't quit properly the first time you would try to do so. Nothing big, but still significant enough to note because it might have bothered you. We've been working on mostly getting the content done by the end of the year. We have 2 weeks of the game done, with some additional days from Day 3 trudging along and a greyboxed version of the entire plot, which we will start testing shortly. Seems like our timeline is still going to pan out. And last week we finished our elevator scene!
The Grim Office (the place where your desk is), as seen from the elevator.
And this is your room! Complete with a mirror where you can choose your appearance, like this one:
Yes, you can be Punk Cthulhu. There are actually a lot of visual combinations that you can choose from with the mirror. If my math is correct (it rarely is), you will have 1152 possible combinations, out of 8 heads which have 6 variations, and 3 clothing sets which have 8 variations. Try and get them all! [previewyoutube=UCVaN3fltXI;full][/previewyoutube] Excel at your job, and you might collect enough souls to barter at the shop in the basement of the Office Tower!
Who knows what else you can find in Quartermaster Mortimer's Plunder Emporium! The ever-humble Mortimer will gladly part ways with their treasure, if you have the, uh, currency. That being said, I really like to see how the game is coming together. I've been a part of many game productions now and this is usually the most stressful phase: to make sure everything comes together. Even though it can be stressful (it's surprisingly not as stressful as I had thought), it's wonderful to see all the cool stuff in the game, working, as it should be. It's very motivating as well, to say the least! Our team is amazing, to be honest, and their work is about to hit the spotlight... Only a few more months until release! If you want to say hi or chat with us or give us your feedback and ideas, join us on our social media! You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Discord. The quickest way to join in on the conversations is Discord, because we lurk there all the time anyway. Till next time, and stay Grim, everyone :) Much love! Death and Taxes

Hi everyone! Oak here! As a quick introduction, most of the presence you'll see around social media concerning Death and Taxes will be either by me (oakwarrior) or Leene (freakoftheyear). I'm the programmer on the project, and also a bit of a project manager, while Leene is the lead artist and also the project lead. I'll probably make a longer introduction about the team (we're about 6 people) in another post :) I'll keep this week's devlog fairly short, just with a few updates on what we've been doing lately, and what you can expect to come in the course of this year. Also, uh, for those unfamiliar with the project, this is actually our 12th devlog, as we've been posting them on itch.io, but we're gonna start posting here as well! First off: We've applied to the Spelkollektivet Scholarship Program! If you've been around on itch, following our blog, then you probably know that Leene and I have been living here for the past 2 months. We still have ~3 weeks to go here, and it's been amazing. We want to come back here next year and this MAY happen. If we get the scholarship it will be easier, but we will try and come back here no matter the situation. That being said, you can check out the contenders for the program here: click me! And the voting page is here: click me! There are numerous candidates so be sure to check out all of them and vote for your favourites (not just us) :D
On other fronts, we've been cracking down on our roadmap, and we want to be content complete by the end of the year, which will be a hurdle, but it's still doable. We've finished the character customization system, which you can get a peek of here. We've been trying to hone our marketing skills as well, and I did some major data crunch on our visibility and demo performance here on itch! I posted my findings on reddit, and you can read the whole post (warning: LONG) here. I'm finalizing most of the codebase for the the preparation of the full content of the game and I'm also doing some stability checks and cleanup. Our artists are at work to get all the sweet goodness of art assets in, and our writer is chugging along with the entire structure for the narrative of the game.
It's a monster, alright. It's all going to come together soon! It's extremely nerve-wracking and exciting at the same time, and we hope we can make something that's truly special and that our players will love. Thanks for all of your support thus far and thank you for joining us on this strange journey :D Also if you haven't yet: please wishlist the game! And tell your friends about us :) The more people on this grim adventure, the merrier! Much love! Death and Taxes <3