We're coming to Steam Early Access on May 9th 2023!
We just announced the date at during the Game Devs of Color Expo Direct, which you can check out at this link and support us and all the other brilliant, talented devs involved in the direct!
here is the announcement video itself:
Here's some high level info about the announcement:
- We didn't end up with enough video submissions from our community to include in this announcement video, so what I'm planning to do is hold onto the ones we've received and do another round of submissions when we're announcing our version 1.0 launch!
- Steam Early Access will be sometime in 2023, which should give us plenty of time to get the amount of content we're targeting for early access launch! This will include 3 full biomes of gameplay! Some of our stretch goals and community designs will probably be completed during early access so we can get more feedback on them!
- We will have beta access for kickstarter backers who backed at the Weekend Trip tier or above before our early access date, once we have our first candidate build for early access. I'm aiming to have ready by the end of this year and I will lock down the timing of our beta once we've confirmed that is ready! We're planning to use this to identify bugs, and confirm that the early access build is meeting your excitement for the game!
- Based on the success of the beta, we will hopefully spend our development time in 2023 working on additional content that will be added to the game as early access updates, so there's interesting things to check out and return to the game for until we eventually hit version 1.0! If during beta, we identify high priority changes we'd want to make to the initial early access build before that goes live, we may end up focusing more heavily on that instead! How often we'll be able to add updates during early access, whether that's weekly (unlikely!), monthly, or a longer stretch of time, will depend on how much content we're able to make in 2023 to stay ahead of that cadence, and how much additional effort we decide to put towards improving the initial early access build!
Game Devs of Color Expo is this weekend!
If folks aren't already aware of Game Devs of Color Expo, it's one of my personal favorite conferences of the year and is completely remote and accessible no matter where you are! Midautumn is participating this year and I'll be giving two talks this year! One of them is about procedural storytelling and how we build our tools in Midautumn to be able to do a reactive narrative, and the other one is more about the reality of how we pay our bills as indie devs! Both of these are pre-recorded so I'll be able to answer questions in chat during the entire talk if anyone wants to say hi!
I super recommend checking the conference out, you can get tickets at this link at any point throughout the weekend, they have a number of affordable pricing options, including a form you can fill out here at any point during the conference for a free needs-based ticket
That's it for this update! Hope to see people there, and I hope y'all enjoyed the announcement video!