(This is a repost from Steam Community. We will try to have itch.io in sync with steam at least for the next phase of the development).

We’ve finally released the demo for NET.CRAWL. It was a lot of work, but everything went relatively smoothly. Sure, we completely flopped on the marketing front (which was expected), but I have no regrets and am overall satisfied with where things are at right now.


Now that the demo is out and some of you have launched it more than once, it’s time to shift gears a little. We’re rethinking how we should approach updates and have this idea of transforming the demo into something that feels more like a free early access experience.

What's free early access?

Well, most demos are designed in such a way that you wouldn’t want to spend more than a couple of hours in them. We want to have a demo where people could easily spend 10, or better yet, 20+ hours in and be reasonably entertained in the process. We want people to have a reason to launch it a couple of times per month.

To get there, we need to focus heavily on gameplay. The current version of the Deep Run is... well, old. It was built as a testing ground, not something you’d play after work for fun. I think we can make it way more varied and replayable with relatively low effort.


Starting in March, we’ll be rolling out two updates per month, each with around 20 new gameplay entities (nodes, aspects, locations, etc.). That will put us on track to eventually double the amount of content the game has, and that’s when it should get close to a release-ready state.
We won’t be holding anything back. But we might start rotating content eventually; otherwise, the new stuff will get diluted by the old one too much, and it would be harder to receive feedback.
The next update is scheduled for March 15th.


In conclusion, there’s not much else I’d want to say, other than I’m happy with the fact that some people seem to enjoy the game a lot, and I’m super excited to finally get back to working on gameplay after months of polishing and telling other people what to do.

Huge thank you to everyone who reached out to me or made a video about the game.

Denis (ObsoleteOne)