Quartermasters, Merchants and Divine Researchers,
It's Steam Next Fest and our demo is here! Well, it's been out for a while now and it's wonderful to see everyone's reactions to our game. Of course, there's still a lot of things to make but I hope you can see the vision we have for the game and will support us as we go through the Early Access journey together!
Normally for these Devlogs, we give people a few options for the next topic and you can vote on our Discord but today, we wanted to talk about our Early Access. What we're planning, how we want to do things. You might have seen some information in the other Steam news posts, but let's take our time properly to chat.
Early Access Release
So you should have seen that we have a date, we're going into Early Access on the 24th of April 2024! You'll be able to buy our game at a reduced price (compared to when we have our v1.0) and play through two biomes!
You can unlock the rest of The Woodlands and get the Carry and the Loamy Spark, and explore our new biome, The Mountains and play with the new mountain Sparks!
A little glimpse at three new friends to look forward to!
Continuing Demo Save Games
You will not be able to continue the saves you've started in the demo.
The game has been changed too much and a lot of things have been added. Unfortunately, this will happen a few times during Early Access - when we change the world generation rules, it will break every save. Of course, we don't want to keep ruining everyone's saves, so we'll be careful to only break saves when necessary.
To alleviate this issue, we'll release updates in beta branches to make sure that any big updates that will require you to start afresh is as good as possible. Starting from Early Access, we'll also keep old branches so that if there was something you wanted to complete, you'll be able to continue your save in an old branch! You won't see any of the new stuff, but we'd like to let you play at your own pace.
You will also be able to skip some of the beginning tutorialization. When you skip the tutorial, you'll start where you can almost immediately leave the village and go straight to the Stumpy Spark Shrine to get your first Spark. We'll also tell you in the updates if we end up changing the beginning and whether we're recommending you to start the new save with the tutorial on, or if you can just dive in.
When you just want to go straight to that first Spark.
The Mountains
We're currently finishing up our second biome: The Mountains! We're still doing some work on the gameplay and progression at the moment and finalizing how we spread out the fun toys that we're going to give you.
Now that you've played for a few hours, we want to ramp things up! You'll have to use ladders, ramps, ziplines and elevators to get yourself, your Sparks and your items up and down elevation levels. You'll have to explore a biome full of aggressive enemies to search for shrines and resources - even simple enemies are a lot harder to deal with when they're in combination with each other.
You'll even find a way to finally create an infinite source of Aether Shards! But making it run perfectly is going to be a little tricky.
What an unusual looking building! What does this one do?
Future Content & 1.0 Release Plans
We're not quite ready to reveal our living roadmap just yet. Our initial plans are to do Early Access for one year, but of course, we want the game to be the best it can be. We'd love to support the game for as long as it needs before we give it the version number 1.0.
We'll have more biomes, more Sparks and more logistical challenges and tools. Including some really fun stuff that we want to already tell you about, but will restrain ourselves for now. You've already got the Early Access release to be excited for!
For now, we hope you enjoy our demo, tell your friends about us, and tell us your feedback and thoughts over at the Steam Discussions, our Discord, or even email us at [email protected].