Heyaa!
Yes, we’re going into early access! :O
This blog post explains why and what to expect.
When? May. I don't have more info than that. When I do, I'll let you know.
We’ve been asked a few times whether we would do early access, and my answer every time was “dunno”. If it was ever to be on the table, it would be for a relatively short time, and its primary purpose would be balancing, QoL features, accessibility aspects, crash fixes, and similar. This hasn’t changed, and the primary purpose for our early access is exactly that.
Since our publishing deal with Versus Evil was signed, some other options opened up, like porting to other operating systems and localization.
As of this moment, we have the game running on Linux, macOS, and Windows. I know some people are already happy with just this :)
Since there’s a ton of text in the game (and this is not an understatement, we have over 800 pages of text!), localization is going to take a while. We want the full release to be fully localized (don't have a complete list of languages yet, when I know, you'll know), so early access will likely last for as long as localization needs, which I’ve been told will be a minimum of 3 months.
While waiting for localization to complete, we want to polish the game up as much as we can. Mat’s been playtesting the game, but he can only get the game balanced up to a point. We plan to have at least two difficulties by EA release and add a harder one during. Feedback on how hard or easy they are would be much appreciated, and if you’re an expert player, which aspects should be tweaked for the hardest difficulty.
In general, we’re at a point where we just need some feedback. We want a large number of people to play the game, and tell us what they think. Tell us what’s confusing, what’s not explained, which abilities suck, which spells are just so OP you never want to go into battle without them, which encounters have typos, which encounter choices feel bad, etc. So if you’re interested in the game, and want to help us make it the best version it can be, we encourage you to join our Discord for a direct communication channel, or post on the Steam forums for a bit delayed communication channel. I do read all of these, it just takes me a bit to see steam posts.
For some other news, here’s a screenshot of some achievements in the game. The icon is brought to you by the magnificence of my doppelganger programmer MarkoZ. Don’t worry, they’ll be replaced with proper ones.
We've also updated some art on the store page. Mad props to my main boi Shiv.
So yeah. Big news. Give us your thoughts! We’re all on our Discord server and happy to talk. I also monitor the Steam forums, but not as quickly as the Discord.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/