This is a transcription of an interview conducted with Leaf Corcoran, the founder of Itch.io (http://itch.io). You can follow him on twitter here: http://twitter.com/moonscript

Techendo [T]: I'm here with Leaf Corcoran. What do you do Leaf?

Leaf Corcoran [LC]: I'm a software developer.

T: What are you currently working on?

[break]

LC: My latest project is something called Itch.io (http://itch.io). It's an independent game marketplace where anyone can upload their game.

T: How many games do you have on there?

LC: As of today there are approximately 350 public games.

T: Wow that's pretty crazy. Are they all independent developers? How big or how small are the companies using your site?

LC: It's all really, really small guys. That was my initial goal was to capture this market of tiny guys that couldn't get into some of the bigger distribution platforms like steam or things like that.

T: What prevents them from getting into Steam?

LC: Steam, as one example, has this concept of Greenlight, which is a process you have to put your game through and people vet your game by voting on it. It's all about popularity. So if you're not a popular indie developer, then you're not going to get on Steam.

T: So you help out the people that can't make friends?

LC: Yeah, pretty much. There are a ton of people out there making games that are not really well known, so they just don't have the popularity.

T: How do you find them or how do they find you?

LC: My original marketing strategy was to go through this thing called Ludum Dare (http://www.ludumdare.com/) which is a 48 hour game making competition. I posted on their site and said, Hey check this site out, I know you guys love making games and maybe you need a place to host it. From there I met a lot of people, especially through twitter, and since then I've just been making a lot of connections.

T: Cool. Tell us about your site. I know there is a pretty cool story there. Everything is custom made, basically, right? You don't use Rails or Django -- what do you use?

LC: This project is the culmination of all my work over the past year. I wrote a programming language called Moonscript (http://moonscript.org/) which compiles to Lua (http://www.lua.org/). I wanted to put it through its runs, so I developed a web framework using it. While I was developing the framework I was building the site, so the two were developed along side one another.

T: How many users of Moonscript are there and is it hard to find developers in Moonscript to help you out?

LC: The Moonscript community is pretty small, but there are definitely users. If you go on Github, there are people watching and participating in the issues in the community, but it's still pretty small.

T: What made you want to create Moonscript?

LC: I had been a pretty big fan of Lua before that. It's a pretty fast scripting language that appears in games a lot and I was interested in Game Development so that's how I found it. At the same time I had also been doing web development with Javascript (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript) and I saw something called Coffeescript (http://coffeescript.org/). I was captivated how Coffeescript worked and how it helped productivity, so I applied the same concept to Lua. Now I have a programming language that adds all these higher level idioms that compile down in to Lua code.

T: What about the future of Itch.io and tell us about your vision.

LC: I just want to try and grow Itch.io. I've been trying to do a lot of things, but it's hard because I'm limited by time so it's more like which features are going to have the most impact. That's what I spend the most time thinking about. A lot of the things people are asking for are ways for people to distribute their game. Initially I was just a set of tools to enable people to host or sell their game. Now when people use the site, they want to get distribution that helps people find their game. So now I'm working on things like featuring games, creating custom collections for games, and developing features that are more about exposing games as opposed to just selling games because that functionality is already there.

T: Great. People can find you at Itch.io (http://itch.io) -- is there anything else you'd like to share?

LC: Nah.

T: Thanks for chatting and we look forward to seeing more great things from you.

LC: Thanks.