Why Early Access?

“We (Cellar Vault Games) currently consist of 2 main members from Malaysia. We’ve decided to move to early access because we’ve spent a long time working on the Plight in a vacuum, and we feel like we need to take a step back and really look at what we’re making and what all of you think about it.

GOALS

• We want to build a community around The Plight, gathering more direct feedback about the game before we continue development on it. We want to see more exactly who feels strongly about the game we're trying to make and what makes them sit up and feel something when they decide to play a game.

• From the start we wanted storytelling to be the driving feature of The Plight, but over the past two years we’ve been doing everything on a shoestring budget, sometimes compromising specialised talent and much needed time to think due to resource constraints. We’d like to take the time to really think about what we need to make this game the way we’d like it and actually plan out what that is and how to get it.

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Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Considering what we’re trying to do with early access, we don’t have an exact time-frame just yet, but we’re hoping to run the early access period for between one and three years. After a period of solid feedback collection and analysis, we’ll be gradually developing and adding new content to the experience over that time.

Above all however, we aim to attempt to deliver our vision of an immersive story-driven experience to our audiences, and that means making sure the game is in a state that we’re happy with before we launch it. -- We’re sure Grandma wouldn’t be happy with that either.”

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

“In general, we plan to make the full game much longer and to cover more of the story we’ve already got planned. In addition to that we intend to add paths and flesh out areas of that story to feel more relevant and have better more complete executions.

To elaborate in the areas we wish to expand:

• Additional story paths revealing more details about some characters you’ve met, some that you haven’t. Grandma’s been keeping more secrets that you know

• Additional environments to better express certain existing story-scenes and some new ones we’ve got planned. Not to give anything away, but not everything happens at home

• More puzzles and more story-based involvement of puzzles. We want to make as much of anything the player experiences involved in telling the story, not just something to do

• Specific requests based on community feedback. While we always want the focus of The Plight to be the story, we do want players to have a feeling of engaging with the world we’ve set the story in, and we’re interested in exploring how we can do that with the community.

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What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The current build introduces a few main characters needed to tell a section of the story, and the main conflict is introduced. We’ve withheld a proper conclusion and some of the other existing story-lines and characters, but all the assets for those plots are in as polished of a state (albeit not final state) as they can be with our current team.”

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

“Yes, the price may differ after we ship new content and features. We appreciate early backers and supporters, therefore, the game will be cheaper during its stay in Early Access. We'll evaluate the pricing accordingly as the game gains features and moves closer toward full release. We'll definitely be talking about it ahead of time!”

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

“As mentioned previously, we plan to have a dedicated period immediately after early access when early-access players are invited to directly comment on things like their opinions on the current state of polish in the early access build, the impact of the story and how it was told in the early access build and what they’d like to see done differently.

In addition to that, we’re thinking of how we can leverage interaction with early-access players as an opportunity for both world-building and meta-gameplay development. Horror is a genre with deep emotional hooks, but many environmental constraints. We personally find it awesome when players get a chance to make a deeper and more involved engagement with a story through ARG style interactions and are eager to try that out. We also would like to develop and reveal a more rich and grounded setting for players to discover our story in and we’d love to find out what reaches our potential player-base at that deep emotional level.

We're gonna be doing most of the feedback collection on discord so feel free to join our server and you can talk directly with the developers (us) about your opinions and reactions. You can also reach us via (CellarVault) Facebook and Twitter. -- Don't be shy!”