Why Early Access?

“ATOYO is an ongoing project with a Tiered development plan, Early access will allow me the developer to make adjustments and tune future updates towards the active player base, as new updates roll out I can add in new items that are suggested by the community, introduce new quality of life mechanics, and over all developed a game the people playing want to play.

Tier 1: is early access, this is what you will have if you purchase the game right now. the general functionality of the game is complete, players can decorate the tavern as much as they want with what items are available and serve simple foods to patrons to gain money to buy new items and resupply their food stores.

Tier 2: is planned as the games first big content update, by this point the player will have reached a popularity level where other adventurers are starting to frequent their location, rare items will become available like dragon heads, and Orc war banners, the player will be able to send adventurers out on quests to gather those rare items for them, as well the weekly merchant will have new inventory in the form of thematical item sets.

Tier 3 and beyond: I will refrain from talking about as these are entirely up in the air, pie in the sky type ideas that may or may not come to the game but i can give an example: being able to adventure yourself for what might be considered "end game" decorations.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“I wish I had a clear timeline, my hope is early access for only 2 - 4 years.”

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

“I plan to include the following abilities:
- Ability to hire adventurers to go on quests to get unique items for the tavern.
- New theme packs that will change the look of the tavern itself.
- Additional item packs that will provide players the ability to theme their tavern around a particular fantasy trope such as evil castle, dwarven mines, holy temple, farmers paradise, etc.
- NPC Theme packs that will follow the item and tavern packs, though you can pick a tavern pack, item pack and NPC pack individually, so your creepy castle can be filled with happy gnomes, and decorated with dwarven items.
- Character customization, though you often don't see your character in game it is still nice to know that you made them unique.
- Modular tavern design, the ability to change the layout of the tavern and potentially add in rooms for rent, or just more floor space to display cool stuff.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“playable, the tier 1 gameplay is in a solid (or semi-solid) playable state with only a few bugs.

Players can:
- Decorate with a select number of pre unlocked decorations
- sell food to npc customers
- earn gold from that food to buy new inventory.
- unlock new items at the weekly merchant
- reroll the merchants item for a small fee

The inventory system:

To make the game more user friendly the inventory and unlocked items are two separate things. This allows players to purchase any number of chairs from the merchant to stock their tavern, and those chairs can be used as any unlocked chair in the players decorations panel.

if you want to purchase five chairs and have each chair have a different appearance you can do that (though at early access release (sept 27th) there are only 4 chair options)”

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

“yes, once the game is complete I intend to raise the price by a few dollars.”

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

“Atoyo is a game about decorating, community feedback and ideas will be crucial to the future of the game, the breadth of items in the game is only limited to what we can come up with and the community will have many more ideas than I myself do.

If you would like to join the community you can follow along on the development volgs on youtube, or the constant nitty gritty updates on Twitter.”