Why Early Access?

“Winter Is Here is a tower defence you also have to build and staff, and that combination is decided almost entirely by balance: how far a worker walks, how much warning a night gives you, whether a wall is worth its wood. We test that against our own simulations, but a simulation only plays the way we thought to ask. Real players find the strategy we did not anticipate, and the night that is unfair rather than hard. Early Access lets us tune the game with the people playing it, which is the only way we know to get a defence game right.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We are aiming for roughly 9 to 12 months, though we would rather stay longer than leave with the balance still moving. We would rather give you a range we might miss than a date we would have to break.”

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

“We plan to keep adding content and depth throughout Early Access: more maps and more of the valley to build across, further defender and enemy types, more to do with the camp between nights, and continued work on how the game plays with a controller and on smaller screens. We also plan to keep expanding the language support.

How much of that lands, and in what order, depends on what players ask for and on what turns out to work when we build it - so we would rather describe the direction than list features as though they were already finished.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The full loop is playable now: build and staff a camp by day, hold the keep through escalating nights, expand the valley as you survive. It has the tower and wall types you can see in the screenshots, weather that changes how a night goes, thirty achievements, save slots, gamepad support, and an interface translated into fourteen languages.

It is an Early Access game and plays like one in the places you would expect: content breadth is narrower than we want it to be, and balance numbers still move between updates. Please buy it for the game described here, not for the one described above.”

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

“We plan to raise the price gradually as we add content and features. Buying during Early Access means paying the lower price for everything that comes later - the game is never sold twice.”

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

“The quickest route to us is inside the game itself: the MORE menu has "Report a bug" and "Suggest a feature", and both go straight to our studio queue rather than an inbox nobody reads. We read every one.

We also watch the Steam Community Hub discussions for this game, and we post patch notes for every update in a consistent format - one line per change, with the actual numbers when something is rebalanced - so you can see whether the thing you raised moved.

For this game the feedback we most want is about difficulty and pacing: which night broke you, which tower you never build and why, whether a blizzard felt exciting or just punishing. Those reports change actual numbers in the next update, and we call the changes out in the patch notes so you can tell whether it helped.

What we cannot promise is that every suggestion becomes a feature; we are a very small studio and some ideas will not fit the game. What we can say is that reports and suggestions genuinely set the order we work in, and that the things players tell us are confusing or annoying tend to get fixed first.”