Dusty Tome Keepers - Followers of Dusty Tome

Hello there, welcome back. It has been a while.

Ominous! is now on Steam! It has been quite the journey, and if you have the time, we can tell you the story.

Ominous! began as a Kickstarter back in 2013, a dozen years ago! Kickstarter was just getting big, so, a few friends got together to try to make something of it. Thus, Dusty Tome was born. Ominous! was funded by our backers, twice as much in fact, and we spent the next year making it, releasing in 2014.

The journey to Steam was much more complicated. We had gotten our game on Humble, itch.io, and Desura… If the last one doesn’t ring any bells, it’s because it was a short-lived indie games platform that went under… taking our sales with it.

Of course, we wanted on Steam. Everyone wanted on Steam, so at the time, they were running Steam Greenlight, a community vote to see if you get onto Steam. So, we put ourselves on Greenlight. We talked to communities, and we pushed and pushed, until finally, we were Greenlit … in July 2016.

Two years after finishing development, things were different for us, the team had other things they needed to do, and, unfortunately as is usually the case, life happened in a way that split us up.

Fast forward 8 years late, some time has passed. We’re a little bit older now, a little bit wiser, but mostly older. Various little things were done, but nothing much. The itch came to make more of the games we wanted. In looking to come back, we decided, well, we should probably look back to what we had already made…

Steam is quite different now than it was when we developed and released. Greenlight is gone, you have stickers now, and the Steam deck is nifty.
Putting Ominous! on Steam required some tinkering, and coding that you did years ago certainly looks foreign. Also, why did you do that? But we reopened those wounds, stuck in some Steam stuff, and kicked it out into the world like a misshapen teddy bear.

We were actually hoping to do a “remastered” version, where we cleaned it up a bit, and smoothed things out – it was never going to be modernized or anything – but after looking over the code, looking at the… mistakes creative choices we made, we realized we’d have to rebuild the entire thing from the ground up. Effort we’d rather put into something new.

And something new, we will do!

We are starting now to put ideas into our next venture. We aren’t quite ready to announce right now, but we hope to soon. But look, we have a new logo!

Anyway, thank you very much for listening and supporting us! Join our Discord[discord.gg] if you’d like to chat, and we’ll keep you updated!