Why hello there! We have something exciting to share with you: World Apart is available on Steam Early Access! Hoooray! 🎉
Before you delve into World Apart, there's a few things you need to know.
- Windfall Studios is an independent, self funded studio with experienced developers, but we are still a fairly small studio. As a small studio, we want to avoid getting drowned by the potential flood of players a fully open Early Access period might bring. The way we have chosen to do that is to charge a symbolic sum for this version of the game. Our hope is that this will leave us with genuine feedback, from players who really care about games and want to have an impact on World Apart.
- What you are about to play is a work in progress. This Early Access version of World Apart is primarily a technical demo, and by playing you are helping our developers shape the platform that coming episodes will be layered on top of.
- Throughout Early Access we will keep an active and continuous dialogue with you via the Steam community forums. That means that we are not just going to keep you updated of how we’re progressing, we’re going to discuss the development of this game with you, and you will be able to influence the development as it happens in a very tangible way.
In other words, we are developing this game in public, with you being able to see what we are working on and when, as well as provide us with feedback and suggestions while seeing the product grow over time.
The areas we are most keen on getting feedback on right now is movement and interaction. You will find a post about known issues in the Steam Community Discussion Forum, and we encourage you to let us know if you encounter something we should know about.
Since the story in World Apart is such a large part of the World Apart experience, we have chosen to keep the Early Access version of the game as free of spoilers as possible. You can however explore the laboratory freely, (altough we suggest you follow the tutorial at first) and we highly recommend giving the shooting gallery a go. Rumor has it that there are leaderboards.
Now, on to the practical bits! You might want to take a quick look at controls and the settings menu before you get started. Let’s begin with the controls. Let’s begin with the controls.
Oculus Rift
HTC Vive
Windows Mixed Reality
Settings
If at any point you feel that the default type of movement isn’t for you, we’ve got you covered. Just head into the settings menu, and switch to your preferred type of motion.
- Left side: UI Highlight color
- Curved line on top left: movement smooth/teleport
- Top middle icon: “Rotation”
- Top right icon: HUD Reticle
- Bottom left: quit
- First slider: movement speed
- Second slider: volume
- Third slider: graphical quality
We are really excited about going on this journey with you all, and we are looking forward to a constructive Early Access period, filled with lots of tweaking, bug fixing and unhealthy amounts of caffeine. See you in the lab!