Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork took Pixeljam four years to create, first Kickstarted in 2010 with $11,200 and finally released on iOS in March 2014. An argument could be made that Pixeljam co-founder Miles Tilmann has spent enough time thinking about that little pink alien with the weird name, but he’s not done yet. In a post on Tilmann’s new personal blog, he outlines the mistakes Pixeljam made during those four years, presented with the perfect vision of hindsight.

Before diving into the post itself, Tilmann tells Joystiq that this isn’t the happy-ending success story many independent developers may dream about.

“Glork hasn’t really made much money at all,” he says in an email. “None of our games have, actually! We had our best week of sales when we launched Glork on mobile earlier this year, but after the Apple featuring ended, sales went down to pretty much nothing. The Mac / PC release has been much less successful than the mobile version. Pixeljam doesn’t actually pay its employees anymore, since it can’t support itself based on our existing sales. We make money doing non-Pixeljam-related things these days.”