I'm back after a long summer break.

Hey all!

How are you doing?

I don't even know where to start. I guess, let me first welcome all the 39 new subscribers for whom this is your first issue. Welcome! It really means a lot to me.

Secondly, it's been 100 days since the previous issue. Well you can at least see, that I keep the promise of no boring scheduled content, just for the sake of content.

So what was I up to? Well, first I took a long holiday break, I was off for 4 weeks and I've not opened my work laptop once, and I opened my personal laptop only a couple of times to check a map or book something.

It was great, I relaxed my brain and healed my soul, but what it meant for this project is that the backlog of submitted games grew to 370 games. Apologies, if you submitted a game and it's still not been processed. I'm going through the backlog, but another problem is that I have on average 6-8 new games submitted every, single day. The backlog sits on 500+ games at the time of writing this. I'm automating as much as I can, but I still like to play each game myself before approving so apologies again, it's taking time.

Games balance

This time, I'm not going to list all the games I've added/removed since the last newsletter cause it would be too long. Instead, please head to the changelog to see for yourself. It was a lot: +218 added, -13 removed, -9 discontinued. And there's currently 578 sitting in the backlog for me to go through.

Site improvements

1. You can now not only add a game to your ritual, but also bookmark for later, like this you can have an active collection and occasional or curious collection
2. I've re-organised the navigation to group together best games and all my writing under blog, which made more space to bring back play my ritual at the prime spot
3. Each game page now has a the game's screenshot!
4. For some games I started to add a separate How to play section, the plan is to add to all, but you know, time, energy, work life balance sometimes gets in a way. Check how it looks on Wordle
5. And hey! I've got a youtube channel where I'm posting How to play guides! I'm too shy to show my face for now, but as a wannabe youtuber I invite you to like and subscribe :D
6. I made my own internal dashboard to help me get through all the submission, approve reviews, manage subscribers so I'm able to process things way faster
7. I've added a collection of phrases to assets.dles.gg as I'm planning to make a tiny game and I need a bunch of phrases so why not share them

Blog

I wrote an article explaining why DLES.gg does not have a community discord. TLDR I hate duplication and there's already an awesome community run by aukspot. Read the full thing if you like here or just join the discord here..

And btw, the fact that I'm not planning to launch a community channel, does not mean I don't want folks contributing to DLES.gg, quite the opposite, if you would like to write an article for the blog, please send it my way. I'd love to publish more, not everything needs to be written by me.

What's happening in the industry?

1. The Atlantic removed another game - Stacks
2. Rename your Share button to Copy results, and improve your conversion rate 4x. A/B test results shared by beardedjoe maker of vocalstim.app on in the aukspot's discord channel

I hope you enjoyed the read!

You can support me by buying me a coffee, thanks!

Or share the word about my site with your friends. Why not by clicking on that share button on your ritual page and send it to your friend, so they can see what games are you playing daily? (maybe I'll rename it to Copy ritual to get you all clicking it more;)

Or just reply and tell me what I can do better! (the bookmarking feature was a subscriber request - hello Baba Yaga 👋)

So that's it. I hope to send the next issue a bit earlier, but muse is an unpredictable friend, so who knows.

Have a great week!

Keep puzzling!

Peter peter@dles.gg

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