All Aboard the Early Access train!

[Accurus]

Hello and thank you all for the support so far. All of us at developing Lord of Rigel are excited and humbled to be at this point of being days away from Early Access. Nobody knows better than us how much time has passed and how much effort has gone with it. We are happy to be at a stage to release a product for general consumption and feedback. Not many people who decide to start game development from their living room get to this moment.

So far like anything regarding feedback, it has been a spectrum from unoriginal MOO2 clone to “I really like it.” Users have found some new and inventive ways to show us just how many ways code can fail, how different all of our computers are with settings, or how just not obvious something that seems obvious to us is. I really want to thank everyone for the feedback and understand when we comment back on generalized feedback of “I don’t like it.” From our perspective it isn’t about antagonizing users for not liking something but rather us trying to take a feeling and make it into something we can quantify, evaluate and ideally implement. We really appreciate how generally respectful and courteous people have been and we are looking forward to continuing the conversation with you.

I wanted to provide a status from my perspective about where I think the game is and where as a team our thinking has been regarding Early Access. We have a rough 4x strategy game that needs community feedback and additional features that the Early Access process will provide us. During our game engine change a couple of years ago we were very intentional in trying to get the game paired down into a core 4x game that we could release and get feedback to improve. We didn’t want to work on this for another 6 years and not having something to present For me all is going to plan as we have released something and are getting great feedback that we have begun to implement and will continue to do during Early Access.

The game clearly has its bugs as we are seeing reported, but the 4x core remains. We have some elements in the game that working and really not working for some folks. As I review of feedback I find it fascinating to see the strong differences in how users are receiving the game and how completely contradictory feedback is. There are some things we implemented during internal feedback that now we are receiving feedback that says “why would you ever do this?” What we are seeing is how different and personalized the 4x genre is for users and for us it is about navigating user feedback and thinking about what feedback aides in our vision of what a 4x game should be.

The feedback from you all as a demo has taught us a lot. We have fixed several dozen bugs, implemented some quick quality of life features and patched the demo nearly daily. You will see that we have been responding to forum posts asking for more details and letting you know that we are recording feedback. We really are recording that feedback and analyzing it. We are taking this feedback and beginning to prioritize it so that we can get it implemented. Our focus moving into EA is first getting the core game right, if that basic recipe doesn’t work then it really doesn’t matter what late game features we are adding. It simply won’t work. We have many of the EA features coded or in final stages of coding so we will be splitting on focus between adding those features, bug fixing, and revising game features.

We have some priorities for quality-of-life features based on feedback, but will also be engaging with all of you through polls to get your feedback on choosing top items you want to see added first. We really want EA to be a collaborative process so we can develop the best product we can. As we plan out features we will also be reaching out to you for feedback. For example, overwhelmingly users are wanting to access the research menu differently. We have begun mocking up some designs and will be presenting those in the future for community feedback.

Again I want to thank everyone for the support and patience so far. We are happy to be at this stage with Lord of Rigel. You all have really been great to talk with and all of us are looking forward to continuing talking about Lord of Rigel.