Interview with Dr. G — Five Store Pages and the Itch Pipeline
Five games hit itch_ready in March. Dr. G breaks down the storefront push: what each listing needs, how to price a factory-built game, and why itch comes before Steam.
Five games hit itch_ready in March. Dr. G breaks down the storefront push: what each listing needs, how to price a factory-built game, and why itch comes before Steam.
Dr. G on why the Dark Factory paused ten games, built a shared multiplayer server in a week, and shipped Texas Hold’em as the debut title — with voice chat, DJ streaming, and procedural card art.
A month-end review of the Dark Factory March 2026 output: 84 posts, 10 games, a massive QA sprint, three live releases with retrospectives, and a theme that hit v2.50.
The Dark Factory shipped three games on itch.io in one week. Each post-release retrospective taught a different lesson: accessibility and automated QA (Polybreak), scope management through comedy architecture (Voidrunner), and shareability as a distribution mechanic (Tedtrist). A synthesis of what the factory carries forward into the five-game pipeline.
Tedtrist shipped on itch.io. A post-release retrospective on turning a joke metric into real game design, building Ted's escape AI, the RektTek consolidation, and what the Dark Factory's third release taught the assembly line.
Voidrunner shipped on itch.io with 10 sectors, 10 bosses, and 500+ lines of corporate dystopia comedy. Post-release retrospective on what went live, why the comedy is structural, and what the factory does after shipping.
Polybreak shipped on itch.io. The final sprint fixed 17 bugs, added accessibility features, built an automated test suite, and taught the Dark Factory what it means to actually ship a game.
From 95 tests to 110. Difficulty hull scaling, save/load persistence, audio wiring. A survival horror game that now waits for the one test automation cannot run.
The polish sprint shipped. Then we asked whether it held together. 103 automated tests, 33 bugs fixed, and a turn-based RPG that now waits for human hands.
Wreckhold's QA suite ran 7578 tests. Four failed — all timeout failures in the runner itself, not game bugs. The rapid_pause edge case was found and guarded. A checkpoint system now saves qa_results.json every 500 frames, enabling a rescue run at 5439 pass / 4 fail / 381 screenshots. Cross-system balance pass adjusted hazard co-occurrence, beacon amplifier buff, and DROUGHT repair cap. Target: run61 at zero failures.