Why Early Access?

“We started to develop Hide & Hold Out more than two years ago.
We left our jobs & studies to work full time on this ambitious project and managed to create something that is getting close to the idea we had at the beginning, by our own means, trying to not spend too much.
But we knew from the beginning that the project was too big to be entirely completed in only two years by a reduced team.

We have made huge sacrifices, both social and financial, to achieve this progression in the development. We have done all we were able to do by ourselves and that was hard, despite all of our determination, and the fact that we definitely love our job.

Anyway, even without considering our personal situation, we think that everybody knows that developing a game has a cost. Our will to succeed compensates us, and has for a long time, but we think that H2o deserves to have the means to grow with a larger team and the proper equipment going forward into the future.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“To be honest, this question is directly related to our means (especially humans).
If we are able to hire a full team in the near future: the development will progress faster and further, since we plan to bring this project as far as we possibly can.

We are doing our best to complete most of the important features before 2017. But as you can imagine if we focus only that, we will have the entire supporting structure but not the bodywork, the polished paint and the heated seats. If we can put it that way.
That's why we guess that it will be more like searching for a balance between new contents and new features.

We must emphasize that the end of the "early access" does NOT mean the end of the development, in any way!”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“We would say that once the game will have reached a fun and balanced gameplay and a suitable stability, there will be no more need to use the term "early access", but, as we already said, it doesn't mean that the development will stop there at all.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“We currently have a version of the game playable enough for it to be submitted to the public.
Even if many elements are still missing. We will pursue the development by considering every want of the community one after one, adding new gameplay where it is the most missing, balancing, testing, polishing...
Always in order to improve the whole game in the best way.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“The price of the game will not change during the early access, but only a little once it is fully released.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“We have tons of ideas for H2o, and some of these promise to be definitely amazing in action. We keep the best ones to ourselves for now of course, but you can find, upvote, submit ideas on Trello. You can also discuss with other players and the developers about the future of H2o on Reddit.

Trello: https://trello.com/b/kDBzUl9h/hide-hold-out-h2o-dev
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/playH2o/

We think that being close to the community is mandatory to make a game that most of the players can love, and having the possibility to see day after day what it is that the community wants the most helps us on that way. This has such a great importance to the development.
A kind of mutual benefit between the player who wants to have fun and the developer who wants to do the things well.”