Hello everyone!
We at GRIP420 are very excited for Photonic Distress releasing on Steam. We are a tiny indie studio with just a couple of active devs and some very good friends helping us. Regardless of our size, we've put as much work into polishing PD as we could before we even thought of putting it on Steam. We avoided Early Access specifically. Nevertheless as we all know there is no such thing as a perfect piece of software (except Half-Life 3). So after release we will actively support the game and fix all bugs that might show up.
To try and give back to community we are planning a small competition:
PD includes small speedrunning/timetracking elements that track your current level and overall time. We plan to give away some Steam wallet gift cards for best times in each of 4 difficulties: Easy, Medium, Hard and Impossible. We are also planning to tie the number of gift cards given out to our sales performance. The better the game will do - more gift cards will be available for giveway (the cards will be given away to top 2,3,4 etc best times in each category).
While details will come in a later announcement, there will be some measures taken to ensure the fairness;
These include but are not limited to:
* Everyone will play the same Seed
* All of the gameplay should be recorded for proof (singleplayer games are very easy to manipulate, we want fair competition!)
* The prize will be given away only to the Steam account that will be visible in the gameplay video
As said above, we'll detail these out in the later announcement. The competition will probably be held in September, exact dates are TBD (but definitely only AFTER fixing any serious bugs)
Meanwhile we suggest you purchase Photonic Distress, learn your way around the game, develop effective strategies for completing the levels and help us find any bugs that we missed.
Based on community feedback we might hold other competitions in the future as well!
Thanks for your attention,
Your friends at GRIP420