Why Early Access?

“Pencil and Paper is a daily newspaper of puzzles. Every morning it prints a fresh edition of columns, generated from the date so every reader opens the same paper, and every puzzle is checked by an independent solver to have exactly one answer before it reaches you. That half is finished, and it is not why we are here.

The half we cannot finish alone is how the paper feels to solve. A generator can make a puzzle fair; it cannot tell us whether a weekday crossword is a pleasant coffee or a lost afternoon, whether an Expert grid is expert or merely large, or whether a column we love is one most readers skip. The only solvers we have on hand wrote the generators, which makes us the worst judges of difficulty there are.

Early Access is how a daily game gets that answer honestly. Solve times, hints taken and puzzles abandoned across real editions, from real solvers at every level, are what we want to set the difficulty ladder against - and what we would like to use to decide which columns deserve more attention and which puzzle types the paper should add next. A daily paper is a promise kept every morning, so we would rather earn that trust in the open, with readers who can tell us the day an edition was wrong, than guess at it behind closed doors.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Roughly 6 to 12 months. A daily game grows with its readers, so we would rather leave Early Access when the difficulty curve has settled than on a particular date.”

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

“We plan to bring every puzzle type up to its final, polished screen, tune difficulty using real solve statistics, add more accessibility options, and keep expanding the language support. We would also like to widen the range of editions.

How far each of those gets depends on what the solve data and the community tell us, so we would rather describe what we are working towards than promise a finished list.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Every puzzle generator is finished and verified - each daily puzzle has exactly one solution, checked by an independent solver before it reaches you. The daily edition, streaks with a forgiving day, achievements, saved progress and a settings screen with real accessibility options are all in.

Some puzzle types still use simpler interim screens, and difficulty is actively being tuned. The interface currently ships in three languages. Please buy it for the paper as it prints today.”

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 single most valuable thing you can send is "this puzzle felt unfair" - with the date and the column. Every puzzle is generated, so that report points us at a generator we can actually go and check. Which puzzle types we expand next is a question we would rather put to the people solving them.

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.”