What happened to RXE?
Alright. I've been putting off this post for a little while, but I think it's important that I get it out there. A little background: RXE was released into Early Access on 21 July 2017. At the time, the plan was to incrementally add features and polish the game until a planned fi
Alright. I've been putting off this post for a little while, but I think it's important that I get it out there.
A little background: RXE was released into Early Access on 21 July 2017. At the time, the plan was to incrementally add features and polish the game until a planned final release around April of this year. Roughly a week after release, the game stopped receiving updates, and was effectively put on hold.
So, what happened?
A lot of things. To start off, the game was in a blatantly incomplete state. The robots worked, and the programming language was functional without too many bugs. The language, however, was very limited - it didn't support branching/boolean logic, for instance, and it wasn't even Turing-complete. This meant that robots were fundamentally limited.
Now, this should have been easy to change, but...it wasn't. To put it simply, I designed the language without considering branching, and it would've been impossible to add it without redoing the entire language (and game). I wasn't too familiar with large-scale programming projects like this, and although RXE taught me a lot about programming, I didn't know much at the beginning.
Of course, the game's reception had an effect here too. I can't release sales statistics, but by looking at the small number and sentiment of RXE's Steam reviews, you can imagine how the game did from a sales/reception standpoint. This wasn't easy for me to accept, and it certainly hampered my motivation to keep developing. Even if the game did "better" at first, I'm not sure what my response would have been.
The final blow here wasn't actually related to RXE at all. About a month after the game was released, I went to college to study (big surprise) computer engineering. I actually took this pretty seriously my first year, and I just decided to put RXE on hold indefinitely. Freshman year was a lot of work, and again, although I learned a lot, I wasn't prepared for things at the beginning of the year.
Due to all of these things, I lacked the motivation (my bad) and time (not in my control) to keep working on RXE. I really wanted to at first! I had put six months of work into the thing, and I genuinely wanted to see this game grow. I guess it just wasn't going to happen.
To be clear, I'm not planning to update RXE in the future. I may revisit the concept, and I may push an update to RXE someday. But in the scheme of things, it's probably better for me to just move on.
It's worth mentioning that RXE's initial price point was (in my opinion) fair for the game at its current state. I made sure not to price the game so that you wouldn't pay for features that hadn't been implemented yet, and I'm confident that this was a good decision.
With all that said, I have to move on from RXE and focus on future plans (more on that in a minute). I don't want to shout this super loudly, but: if you genuinely feel ripped off from RXE (which is a fair concern), please let me know and I'll see how I can help. Please tell me on or before 02 August 2018.
So what about the new game? I won't directly link it here, but I have a new game coming out next week. You can check out my developer page if you want to learn more about it.
Alright. I hope this clears things up. Please leave a comment if you have any questions, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
Take care,
-Bryce Messmann
Buce Studios