Why Early Access?

“Dug Out is a heist game about the one problem heist films skip: the dirt has to go somewhere. That mechanic is unusual enough that we cannot predict how people will attack it. We simulate whole campaigns to check a job is possible with the tools it expects and impossible without them, but simulations do not get impatient, greedy or clever. Early Access lets us find out how real players break it.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Roughly 6 to 12 months, depending on how much the campaign changes once players are digging through it.”

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

“We plan to add more targets to tunnel into, more tools and ways to deal with the spoil, and more variety in what can go wrong on a night. We also plan to keep working on controller support and the language support.

What actually ships depends on what turns out to be fun rather than merely clever, so we would rather tell you the direction than promise a feature list.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The campaign is playable end to end: rent the property, dig over a set number of nights, prop what you dig, get the spoil somewhere nobody looks, and buy better kit out of what the last job paid. Thirty achievements, save slots, and an interface in six languages are in.

It is an Early Access game: the number of targets is smaller than we want, and the balance of heat, spoil and tools is still being tuned. Buy it for the campaign as it stands.”

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 we most want to hear about the moment a job stopped making sense - the night you could not get rid of the spoil, or the tool you bought and never used. The rules a night runs by are all in one place in our code, so that kind of report turns into a change we can test.

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.”