Why Early Access?

“Aftergrowth is made by one person in evenings and weekends. The game is playable end to end already — you can wake with nothing, build a camp, work up from a stone axe to steel, provoke a faction into coming for you, and do all of it with four friends. What I cannot do on my own is find out how that holds up across hundreds of worlds and playstyles. A survival game's balance is settled by how people actually play it rather than by how it was designed, and I would rather that feedback arrive while the systems are still soft enough to change.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“I expect around a year to eighteen months. I would rather say that plainly and be wrong slowly than post a date I cannot hold to — this is evenings and weekends, and I am not going to ship a rushed release to hit a number I put on a page.”

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

“The intention is more of what is already here rather than a different game: more of the map's places built out, more to craft and build, and more variety in how the factions come at you. None of that is a promise. What is in the build the day you buy it is what you are paying for, and everything past it depends on what the year teaches me.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Playable and complete as a loop, not as a content library. In the build today:
▎
▎ - A forested map generated from a seed, with six named towns, a central city, roads between them and a hand-drawn map in your pack from the first minute
▎ - Hunger, thirst, stamina, health and warmth, where night, rain, deep water, what you are wearing and what is burning nearby all argue over how cold you are
▎ - Gathering, farming, cooking, food that spoils, and fires that have to be fed
▎ - Crafting from bare hands through stone, iron and steel, gated by knowledge you research or find written down rather than by levels
▎ - Grid-snapped base building — walls, doors, floors, stations, storage, repair and traps
▎ - Raiders who hear you through anything, see you only in front of them, arrive in parties that surround rather than queue, and are sent by a per-faction ledger of what you have done
▎ - Downed-and-revived rather than killed, injuries that take the top off your health until they are treated, and your pack left on the ground where you bled out
▎ - One to five players, over Steam's relay, so nobody in the session learns anybody's IP address
▎ - Fourteen achievements, Steam Cloud saves, and full controller support”

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

“ Yes. Aftergrowth costs less during Early Access than it will at 1.0, and the price goes up when the game is finished rather than on a date picked in advance. The lower price is what it costs to buy a game while it is still being argued with, and every update between now and then is included.”

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

“Bug reports and balance arguments both reach me, and the second kind is the one Early Access is for. I read the Steam discussion boards, and I would rather hear that a night is too long or a raid arrives too early from somebody who has played forty hours than decide it alone. Where a change comes from a player I will say so in the patch notes.”