Hey guys! Its Untrustedlife here. This week has been very busy, and very stressful. So I had nearly no time to work on the game this week. I think I just need a bit of a vacation this week. There is still dr4x work being done, its just mainly on the art front this week.

I don't want to go into detail as to why this week was so busy and so stressful as its mainly personal.

I will talk a bit about my future plans though.
I'll be honest. For a steam early access game. DR4X has completely flopped. I don’t know what I did wrong. This is my first steam game and only my second unity game and the reception of those who have tried it is nearly 100% positive.

I think that what I have accomplished so far is a really fun and weird game and many others agree with me.

However previous games i've made on other platforms have had much more traction. And i mean orders of magnitude more traction.

I have nearly 60 changelogs, dropping one every week without fail for, I don’t know how long. So lack of activity certainly isn’t a cause.

DR4X is now on 3 platforms, steam, itch and even gamejolt, so lack of platforms certainly isn't the case.

My roguelike RLDR however has thousands and thousands of downloads not just on itch but on my own website as well, and you can find it here: https://untrustedlife.itch.io/roguelegends-dark-realms-0182 and I was certainly not doing weekly changelogs for that.

Despite this complete failure I will of course keep working on the game, as it is mainly a passion project and i'm not going to let that "flop" affect my passion. This is my game, my  passion, and if you like it great, if you don't great, spend your time playing something else.

What Have I Learned:

But I think I learned a few things:

1. As you can imagine this has been kind of demotivating for me. And lately I’ve been trying to add more "visible" things to catch more eyes, but I think that was the wrong approach. Why do I care so much about the amount of downloads, I didn’t used to care. My perspective has changed. I want to get back to that old perspective.

2. I have too many ideas not all of which are equally fun to work on, I need to prune them a bit, down to the fun stuff.

3. I’ve been trying too hard, I force myself to have new content every week and I force myself to make visually interesting changelogs and I force myself to do weird little polish things when I have no fun at all doing that.

What I will be doing from now on:
1.i'll be focusing more on the parts of the game i'm having loads of fun developing, like adding new content (New win conditions, new monsters, new secrets etc) and more fun secretty secret things for players to find.

2. I'm going to stop trying so hard to make visually interesting weekly changelogs in the vain hope that I’ll get any new players on it and I’m going to focus on what I have fun doing with it.
Making changelogs might show that i'm actively developing the game but now that dr4x is on 3 platforms its getting kind of tedious.
So the changelogs will be more like my old changelogs from now on. Maybe with a smattering of dev logs like this one.

3. Polish?? Who cares. Polishing things isn’t getting me more downloads and isn’t fun, and I'm in early access still. The polish can wait.

4. I'm not going to force myself to have new content for the game every week, if I have new content, I’ll have a changelog, if I don’t, ill make a devlog instead or I wont post anything. Forcing myself to do things isn’t fun. Sorry but that’s just how it is going to be from now on.

Thank you SimplyFunGaming for helping me realize that by suggesting, months ago, that I stagger the dev logs more. You are cool as hell.
See his channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/c/SimplyFunGaming

Thank you to my Artist friend Grimwit, who also helped me realize this.
Follow him on twitter
https://twitter.com/Sir_Grimwit

Thanking my players

For the final section I want to thank all those people who have so far reviewed my game, helped me out by making videos on it, and to everyone who plays my game. You are the coolest people alive, and I hope you stick with me while I work on this. Because there will be some wild new content added soon.

Also, I don't say this enough, spread the word. If you like the game talk about it.

I also made a Minecraft mod this week, check it out:
https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/stairs-in-the-woods

Also JOIN MY DISCORD!
https://discord.gg/9mH6Pky