TL;DR – The Forum is now open, and your Fail-Deadly suggestions are welcome here.
Five days ago this year’s IGF finalists were announced, and Fail-Deadly was not among them. That wasn’t really surprising, but even so it was just a little bit disappointing. I was considering calling it the end of that game’s run, calling the current version “final” and shelving the project in favor of new, fresh ideas. I was feeling like the game hadn’t achieved much, at least not beyond its Ludum Dare 18 victory over a year ago, and it left me wondering to what extent it was worth continuing to pour effort into.
But something nagged at me. Ten days earlier I had discovered that PC Gamer featured Fail-Deadly as one of its week’s best free PC games. That feature actually ran back in late November; I didn’t stumble across it till New Year’s Day. I was pretty excited about that shout-out, but I was too late to the party to capitalize on the short-term attention boost. But then this morning I received a tip that Fail-Deadly may have also been featured in this month’s print edition of PC Gamer UK. That’s something I haven’t yet been able to verify… although I’m taking steps to do so, because I’m not quite so humble as to pass up an opportunity to hang a bit of mainstream press in a frame on my wall. 
Then this afternoon I was looking at site stats for Third Helix and I noticed something curious: the vast majority of search terms leading here recently have been for some variation of “fail-deadly”. And subsequently, as you might expect, the vast majority of page hits (aside from the index) have been the Fail-Deadly game page.
It’s always possible that it’s just spam-bots. I Google Fail-Deadly every now and again to see what might’ve popped up without my knowing it, and every time I do that I discover yet another automated “free software” aggregator that’s picked up some version of the game at some point in the past and is now mirroring it on some server halfway around the world, quite probably injected with all manner of malware and awfulness.
But then again, it’s possible that despite my near-complete lack of promotional effort, Fail-Deadly is slowly picking up legitimate momentum on its own merits. And when I entertain that possibility, I can’t imagine how I could ever have felt like the project wasn’t worth the continued effort. 
To that end, I’m making a renewed push toward another significant update to the game. I’ve already gathered some feedback, suggestions, and bug reports from comments on this blog and from Twitter, but those have largely been driven by an existing topic. In the interest of soliciting broader and more open discussion, I’ve opened a forum. There’s a section dedicated to Fail-Deadly, sections for each of my other games, and some general discussion. The forum currently looks about as attractive as a baboon’s ass, but I’ll be working that out over the next few days so that the forum shares the styling of the rest of the site.
So… what would you like to see in the future of Fail-Deadly?
