Dev. Diary #1 “Early Access”
This week, I wanted to talk a little bit more about our approach in announcing early, why Leviathan Wilds looks (and is!) unfinished, and why we did this on purpose. (Note that this article is reposted from BGG).
For a young business, there’s a push and pull between “putting your best foot forward” and “getting feedback from your customers early.” In many ways, showing Leviathan Wilds in this early state risks undermining one of our core messages (that Sam, Todd, and I have made a lot of games), but we feel the tradeoff is worth it to improve the product before we seek funding.
Right now, we’re showing key art and core gameplay that’s maybe 70% indicative of the final product (with room to adjust) and graphic design and scenario content that’s more like 20%. In short, we’re in what we call “alpha.”
What Do You Mean, Alpha?
Like a good chunk of internal jargon, the term was co-opted from video game development, but the similarity is spiritual at best.
For us, alpha has historically been about 3-6 months before the games files are completed and prepped for manufacturing. It’s a few weeks after the design and development stabilize enough to justify putting real time into graphic design. That team plays it a bunch, and then they piece together a placeholder UI that can be stress tested with the solidified rules.
Leviathan Wilds is in what I’d call “advanced alpha” (a term that I just made up). We’ve been testing the placeholder UI for a while now, and while we’re solving a few vexing issues, we believe it’s nearly ready to receive proper thematic graphic design.
For gameplay, we have our two leviathans in the preview (which may yet get balance tweaks), and we’ve done some amount of development and testing on an additional 12 leviathans so far. Several of them are ready to be offered up to our playtesters, and some of the ones that pass muster will be added to the public TTS preview.
Why Though?
There are definitely risks to this approach, but this mode of alpha/early access gives us a valuable opportunity to actively improve the game based on the feedback we get. It could be really easy for us to get stuck on our original vision. Putting it out into the world is one of the purest methods that we can use to discover what our audience wants the game to be. Doing this early lets us incorporate more of that feedback.
So When Will It Be Good?
We already feel like the gameplay and rules are strong enough to show, otherwise we’d still be working behind closed doors. In terms of content and polish, our goal is to show steady improvement, implement feedback, and build the trust that this game will deserve a spot on your shelf.
Crowdfunding is intended to launch in the summertime, and you can expect that everything will be substantially more final. If today’s alpha/early access version isn’t very interesting to you, that’s okay! We’re planning a number of updates to the public TTS preview, so consider checking in once in a while to see our progress. Regardless, we hope to see you this summer!
—Justin
