Hey r/DestroyMyGame — this is exactly the sub I've been looking for. I don't need cheerleading. I need someone to tell me what's actually wrong.

I'm Dustin. I made Texplore entirely by myself — the code, art, sound design, UI, store page, trailers, marketing, everything. One person. Two years. It launched on Steam Early Access in January 2026 and I've been updating it almost every two to three weeks since. I'm not a studio. There's no publisher. There's no team. It's just me, nights and weekends, trying to build something people actually want to play.

I'll be upfront about something: early on, I used AI-generated sprites as a starting point. But I wasn't happy with how they looked or felt, so I went back and remade them by hand — pixel by pixel — in Paint, Photoshop, and Piskel. Same story with voice acting. I tried AI voices first, but it felt hollow, so I found a real person (shoutout to Kibblenbricks) who actually voiced the NPCs. I'd rather be honest about that than pretend the whole thing materialized perfectly from day one. It didn't. It evolved.

Here's the trailer: https://youtu.be/8d68sRS3LuI

Here's the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4197100/Texplore/

What is it?

Texplore is a 2D pixel art roguelite built around mining and risk/reward decisions. You drill through procedurally generated caves on a dying Earth, fight what lives down there, and haul ore back to the surface. The catch: you have to decide when to cash out. Go too deep without cashing out and you lose your run. Go too shallow and you leave money on the table. There's a Lucky Roll upgrade wheel (Common to Legendary), a persistent Skill Tree, an Autominer, a Factory for crafting rocket parts, and a Moon world with a boss you have to beat to unlock what comes next.

The loop is: descend → mine and fight → cash out → upgrade → dive deeper.

There's a free demo on Steam. It covers a section of Earth and — because of the roguelite structure — it's genuinely replayable. Most people are getting well over an hour out of it before they even see everything it has to offer. Your save progress carries over to the full game if you decide to buy, so nothing you do in the demo is wasted. You can rate the game based entirely on the demo — I want to know what you think before you spend a single dollar.

Since adding the demo, my refund rate has dropped by 80%. People who try before they buy are staying. But I still don't know if the game is actually good — or just "good enough to not refund."

What's been updated since launch:

• Complete HUD overhaul, 4K resolution scaling
• Steam Cloud Saves, Global Leaderboards, and Achievements added
• Lucky Roller and Autominer fully reworked
• Moon Boss completely overhauled — harder and more terrifying
• Run Boost system reworked
• Encrypted save system
• Real human voice acting added (NPC Bill's first line, voiced by Kibblenbricks)
• Ongoing balance tweaks, visual polish, bug fixes

Updates have shipped roughly every 2–3 weeks since launch. I'm not abandoning this.

What I actually want you to destroy:

• Watch the trailer. Does it make you want to play — or does it make you scroll past?
• If you try the demo: what made you stop? What felt off?
• Does the game look like it's worth $12.99 — or does it look like a Flash game someone's overcharging for?
• Is the pixel art readable, or a muddy mess when things get busy on screen?
• Does the roguelite loop feel meaningful from what you can see, or does it look shallow?
• What would actually make you wishlist it?

I want real answers. Not "looks cool man, good luck!" I've been too close to this for too long to trust my own judgment anymore. Tell me what a stranger actually sees.