My stressful work project is still ongoing, but after June 3rd, it should be all right and no longer as stressful. This means game development can pick up again!

I haven't been idle, though. I have loads of art ready for new achievements that I want to add. I plan to include an achievement for every campaign mission victory and unconventional victory to see how far folks get so i know what to iterate on. This is a challenge because pretty much no one is playing dr4x so i cant really see my changes have an effect in real time. Man, its almost like you should tell people this game exists and stuff. ;)

Some Game Dev Wisdom:

I can't afford to hire real playtesters, and I only have about four close friends who are all bored of DR4X at this point and way more interested in the side project. The pains of releasing on Steam too early—I certainly learned my lesson there. Everyone says, "get that Steam page up ASAP," but what they don't tell you is to wait until you have a real game before releasing into Early Access. You're competing with more fleshed-out games at that point. Early access on Steam is no longer for alpha games and proof of concepts; it's pretty much complete games that only need bug fixes.. so releasing what is essentially a prototype on Steam is absolutely not the way to go. If I had released DR4X in its current state, it would have been much better received.

Also, a reminder: I'm going on vacation from June 8th to the 17th, so there will be no development during that week. I apologize for the break, as I really want to get stuff done on this game, but my priorities have shifted in the last few weeks due to the work project and stress, along with some new inspiration that struck me.

So today, I'll make a pretty detailed devlog to hopefully make up for it!

First off the changes:

-I gave up on players finding out how to get the good or bad endings without further tweaks, and so now, nearly every single sign in the game hints at what you need to do to push the story forward, most of that just means hinting at unconventional victories, though some of the unconventional victories aren't required to progress the story and so on those missions it hints on what you need to do to progress the unconventional route, this idea came from outer wilds, i realize that to most people signs are just lore, but in DR4X that is not the case, so now i have made it clear that every SIGN will hint at how to progress the story by making each sign hint at what you need to do.

(Outerwilds has been inspiring me a lot lately Click here to see my side project)

-Made it so the outlines arent quite as thick anymore

Yeah, that’s literally the only stuff I got done. I know it’s kinda sad. But no worries, dev will pick up after my (much-needed) vacation. In the meantime, I’m working on the way less difficult to work on side project, but I should get those achievements in this weekend.

Now for the fun part of the devlog!

The ramble on future plans!

We all love this section right?

Untrustedlife ramble session!(Patent pending)

You all like honesty, right? Here’s some honesty: DR4X is kinda burning me out at this point. The only thing keeping me working on this is that person (you know who you are) who leaves a comment on every devlog about how much they like the game. Kudos to you! I don’t want to say your Steam name, but you know who you are. And also all the positive reception to these recent devlogs!

Honestly its amazing how many people upvote the devlogs so its like "wow, there are people who like dr4x" aint that a thing heh (Or they just like reading my rambles lol)

I've had this problem before, around this same time last year! The vacation will absolutely help in that regard. But I’m wondering if what I should actually do is take the current version of DR4X, rework it a bit, make that into a "free demo," and get feedback that way. Meanwhile, I’ll lock all future content under the paid version. I'm also thinking about permanently reducing the price to 5 bucks until the full release, where I will make it 10 again.

How would people feel about that? The current version has a full game essentially, you can play through and get a good or bad ending to the first chapter of the campaign, so all i would really need to do is tweak those ending popups! And just kinda clean up the game in general for it, so it is more appealing and less messy, then take that version, and work from that cleaned up version for all future updates.

This is a similar plan to how i want to get my side project on steam.

Except in that case i would release it as a free game (the tech demo) than work from that "base" to make a proper game with a beginning and ending and a meaningful story.

So here’s my quest for you guys! Let me know in the thread below what your thoughts are on this plan. If I get a decent amount of comments in favor, I’ll make it happen. If I get no comments or more against it, than out of respect to current owners i'll come up with another plan. However, I should note that I might do the same thing but just cut out the skirmish content or something from the demo in that case.

Let me know!

Future plans

In terms of DR4X development, the plans still haven't changed. Here's what's coming up:

-Those achievements should be in this weekend

-Popups for all the new liminal map artifacts

-More artifacts for "normal" maps

-Make game help you out a bit more

-Full steam ahead on Chapter 2 (which is tied to the new noderooms maps), as that is kinda the only thing that will keep me sane.

-There might also be some tweaking of techs. The techs feel kinda redundant after I've added the tile effects, and they are clunky, so I might work on improving that.

-Improving the UI more

-New trailer with all the new UI etc

New Youtube Channel

I have set up a DR4X only youtube channel. Subscribe if you can and i'll be posting some video devlogs (Maybe!) there aswell as videos of me playing DR4X and other dr4x related shenagins!

https://www.youtube.com/@DR4XTheGame

Bella Update

Bella is doing a lot better, she seems to be mostly back to her old self, all she needed was some benadryl! (Vet said she has terible allergies!)

So thats whats up! Thanks folks! MORE ABOUT THIS GAM