Why Early Access?

“Thrive has spent many years in development as a volunteer project. It's been a long journey for us to even reach as far as we have, but we think we now have a solid playable foundation. We are offering Thrive on Steam to reach a wider audience in the hopes that we can finish the game much faster by offering the game on Steam in Early Access.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Roughly 140 months at the current rate of progress. This estimate is based on the progress made in the past year on the first stage of the game. But this is a very uncertain estimate as development speed can vary wildly based on how many involved developers we have and if the upwards trend of development speed of the past years continues or even speeds up further.”

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

“We have a long list of planned features and fixes for the currently implemented stages, as well as grand plans to introduce further stages with smooth transitions between them. These will span from microbial tidepools to space-faring empires, ending with in the Ascension Stage unlocking full sandbox tools to mess with the game world. In the later stages, the game will transition to fully 3D environments, with 3rd person character controls. Beyond that, it will move to a strategic view with 4X features.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Currently we are focusing development on the first stage which is about microbes and microbiology. Only the first stages of the game are currently playable, but even they are missing some features. Starting from the move to macroscopic scale, the rest of the game is only included as tech demo level prototypes to show off our plans for the future stages and how they link together. For the microbial part of the game we have the core gameplay loop - surviving in the environment and editing your species in the editor - up and running with most of the planned features complete. Still there are many upcoming planned improvements to the microbe gameplay and user interfaces before we will switch development focus to the next stage.”

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

“The price will be gradually increased as more and more content is added to the game.”

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

“We have already released multiple releases of Thrive, and after each we have listened to feedback from the players who played that release on our community forums. This has helped us greatly to find unintuitive parts of the game, a huge number of bugs, and also discover ideas that have affected the direction of future development. We also discuss possible future ideas and possible implementations with the community on our forums and on Discord, often helping us shape our future plans. We plan on continuing these approaches to community involvement.”