Hi everybody! Oak here ^_^
Broken Alliance will release in Early Access on October 24th 2024! Very happy to finally be able to announce this, since it's been a heck of a ride. We will release the game in Early Access with a base price of $14.99, and plan to increase it by around 20% for the full release.
I hope you've already seen that we have now finally released our public demo here on Steam! Do try it out if you haven't yet, any feedback about it is more than welcome!
Without beating around the bush anymore, let me get into the reasoning of us deciding to go for Early Access.
As is sometimes the custom in game development, the vision and the scope of the game can change. Such was also the case with Broken Alliance. We started it out as a more casual, shorter, smaller experience, but we quickly realized that in order to make something unique and more aligned with the values that we have as a creative studio, we needed things to be different.
Our lead writer Märten came up with a brilliant storyline for the world going deeper into the conflict that we wanted to initially showcase in the game. Instead of making something that would resemble a regular skirmish map setup in, say, Heroes of Might and Magic games or Age of Wonders and such, we wanted to give a more focused narrative experience. This ended up with the game taking an approach closer to the King's Bounty or Disciples series. We came up with a whole world for you to explore, wherein you can play as one of the four factions in the game, and have a different experience with each one. All the factions will be played on this one large world map, but with quite different starting conditions and very different questlines and narrative experience.
As the idea was fleshed out more and more, we realized that we're definitely going to need more time to realize our new vision. We're very happy with the direction that we took, because we didn't see any point in trying to emulate the masterpieces that came before Broken Alliance, but rather forge a completely new path. This is also the point where we agreed that we would have a form of deckbuilding in the game, not as complex or vast as dedicated deckbuilder games, but something that could have the intuitiveness of such games with the strategic and tactical depth that adventure strategy games are known for. One of our core focuses on this game has been to try and make it easy to pick up, with depth being added the more you progress in the story. Which brings me to my next point...
Making games is hard, yo. We knew that we had bitten off a big piece once we adjusted our vision, but we didn't really exactly know how much time it would take to take it across the finish line. Now, we have come quite close to it. However, to make sure that we make a game for you that both you as players and us as creators can be happy with, we decided to open it up for Early Access. This way we can get your feedback as we take the final steps together to create something awesome. We are going to launch Early Access with the Prologue (that you can play right now in the demo!) and with one faction, Anchorage, being playable throughout most of Act I. In total, we plan to have 3 acts for the game, with Act I and Act II making up most of the game and Act III serving as the final climax.
As we update the game, we will bring you the other factions available to play, and also unlock progression systems step by step, so we can get your feedback on both the content and the balance of the game. We want the game to be challenging, but not impossible! So, any criticisms about that is going to be extremely valuable once we launch into Early Access.
We want to be in EA for at least 6 months, so we would have time to react to your feedback and also take our time to polish Broken Alliance as much as possible. We have launched our dedicated Discord server for the game, which will also be our main channel for gathering feedback. So if you're interested in that, you can join right away ^_^
The hope is that we get a strong initial following as we launch into Early Access so we can get a lot of valuable feedback and much needed scrutiny about the game. If you feel like you want to participate on this, honestly, once in a lifetime launch with us and join the Early Access process, I would appreciate it immensely. This is our biggest project yet, and will probably stay as the biggest project we undertake with our studio for the foreseeable future.
If you want to know a little bit more about the decisions that led us to Early Access, feel free to browse the "Why Early Access?" section on our store page.
For now, I hope that you're as excited as I am for the initial release. I can't wait to show you what we have in store!
Stay tuned for more blogposts like this one soon, where I give some details about the four factions that we feature in Broken Alliance.
Thank you all for your support so far and I hope we can create something you have a lot of fun with!
Much love,
-Oak