So, I wanted to post one final update on the giveaway for everyone now that all of the keys have been manually sent out.
So what exactly happened with this giveaway? Well... on April 16th after the giveaway period had ended when I realized something might have gone amiss with the giveaway in general, I sent a message to IndieDB staff to ask whether anybody had received their keys and what was going on, if there was anything I could do to help, etc.
The next day I generated a list of the 150 followers on my game page that had undoubtedly been added thanks to the giveaway, and I realized I could get another batch of keys and start manually sending them out that way even if something had gone wrong with the giveaway itself. I started doing that because to me it was more important that people who were interested in playing the game has a chance to do so. That's also what prompted me to change to a full pay-what-you-want option including free.
IndieDB staff asks to allow 48 hours for a response to messages, but by the 19th and even the 20th I had not received a response yet. By then I was already well underway sending out keys manually within their website's private message restrictions of 10 to 12 PMs per 24 hour period for new users like myself. It was a slow process but at least I could start to do something to thank folks for entering and salvage the giveaway.
Now there were two things that happened next here that were mostly negligence on my part. First, I neglected to consider that this was all during a holiday week(end) for Easter, and so the response times would naturally be longer than usual with people busy for holidays and things like that.
Secondly, IndieDB staff did get an email back to me on the 23rd, explaining that the problem had been because of the length of the actual keys that itch.io had generated, it had caused issues with IndieDB servers, causing some errors, and thus not sending out the keys. However, they had gone ahead and fixed this issue for my giveaway and sent out the keys on the 23rd. But here's where my negligence came in again, in that somehow I did not see this message until the 26th (there were no site updates that I had received a response, only an email reply, and I neglected to check that account for a couple days for whatever reason.) By the 26th though, I was already most of the way finished with sending out the other set of manual keys, so I decided to just keep sending the rest until the last batch finished today (the 30th.)
So long story short: some of you may have gotten 2 keys, one sent by the staff/contest itself on the 23rd, and a second one sent via PM on this site directly from me sometime between the 17th and the 30th. That's fine if so, feel free to send the spare key to a friend or whatever else. There were about a dozen or so folks on my list of 150 who I could not send a PM to because their profile was set to private/friends only. And of course the other 41 people who entered the giveaway that I didn't know about, I'm hoping some of them were able to get a key from the 100 sent out by the staff, or see the messages I posted earlier in the month at least.
But I think that about wraps it up. In the future it may help to know there is a feature with Itch.io that allows you to shorten the key links, and maybe IndieDB staff can make note of that feature and maybe make the length limit problem more transparent to help resolve some of these issues, but either way, I believe most of you who were interested have now been given a chance to check out the game in one fashion or another.
I want to thank everyone again for their patience and understanding with this giveaway, and thank you for your interest in my game and for entering the IndieDB giveaway. I really hope that you enjoy the game.
If you never received a key, and wanted to play Death? Preposterous!, it's under a pay-what-you-want setup now, including the option to play it for free, so please check it out over on Jayrayhawk.itch.io or Jayrayhawk.gamejolt.io at your convenience.
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