Today's collection of independent game links include some friendly advice about getting your game on Steam, an article about developing RPGs, and a look at the very successful community support that Wolfire Games is providing to their fans. (image source)

Indievision: How to approach Steam
"The Valve guys will see hundreds of games a day all from hopeful developers who are keen to get their game published. There is no easy way to make sure your game is ahead of the queue. There are however, some fundamental things to get right."

Play This Thing: Xong
"Xong is an odd and idiosyncratic munge of a Rogue-like, a level-based puzzle game, and an Arkanoid clone. It's Rogue-like, in that it's an ASCII graphics game with procedurally-generated levels, but the actual gameplay is puzzle solving with Breakout-like aspects."

World of Banov: The Problem with RPGs
"Making an RPG is hard and not to be attempted by the inexperienced. In terms of game making RPGs pose way more obstacles than any other genre of video game. So as a cautionary tale I'm going to talk about what I've learned about making RPGs and some of the pitfalls in designing them."

DIYgamer: IGF Submission Picks - Flywrench and About a Blob
"For this week's column, I played through an incredibly difficult masterpiece in Flywrench and for the second time chose a platformer, About a Blob, which I didn't get to play but was attracted to its style."

Oxeye Game Studio: Secret Gifts – Video Leaked
"A secret source deep within the Oxeye team gave me a MiniDV tape of a heavily damaged video. I was able to retrieve some pictures and share them with you. This is what I was able to recover."

Wolfire Games Blog: Oh no, more Meebo
"Our live chat widget proved its worth again during the preorder pack promotion. At times I seemed like I was giving support to ten people at once. A lot of good can come from maintaining a live chat but since productive conversations are boring, I humbly submit to you, another smattering of silliness."

Wolfire Games Blog: John's development environment
"Last month, we put a call out on the blog asking for community questions to answer. The most popular question was if we could do a video tour of our development studio."