Miksi Early Access?

Thrive has spent many years in development as a volunteer project. It's been a long journey for us to even reach as far as we have, but we think we now have a solid playable foundation. We are offering Thrive on Steam to reach a wider audience in the hopes that we can finish the game much faster by offering the game on Steam in Early Access.

Miten kauan peli tulee arviolta olemaan Early Access -vaiheessa?

Roughly 150 months at the current rate of progress. This estimate is based on the progress made in the past year on the first stage of the game. But this is a very uncertain estimate as development speed can vary wildly based on how many involved developers we have and if the upwards trend of development speed of the past year continues or even speeds up further.

Millä tavoin lopullinen versio tulee eroamaan Early Access -versiosta?

We have a long list of planned features and fixes for the current Microbe Stage, as well as grand plans to introduce further stages with smooth transitions between them. These will span from microbial tidepools to space-faring empires, ending with in the Ascension Stage unlocking full sandbox tools to mess with the game world. In the later stages, the game will transition to fully 3D environments, likely with 3rd person character controls. Beyond that, it will likely move to a strategic view with 4X features.

Mikä on Early Access -version tila tällä hetkellä?

Currently we are working on the first stage which is focused on microbes and microbiology. Only the first stage of the game is currently playable and it's missing some features. We do however have the core gameplay loop - surviving in the environment and editing your species in the editor - up and running. Many organelles are already implemented, some are still waiting to be added. We will also dramatically expand the algorithm behind other species' evolution.

Muuttuuko pelin hinta Early Access -vaiheen jälkeen?

The price will likely be increased once much more content has been added.

Miten yhteisö otetaan mukaan kehitysprosessiin?

We have already released multiple releases of Thrive, and after each we have listened to feedback from the players who played that release on our community forums. This has helped us greatly to find unintuitive parts of the game, a huge number of bugs, and also discover ideas that have affected the direction of future development. We also discuss possible future ideas and possible implementations with the community on our forums and on Discord, often helping us shape our future plans. We plan on continuing these approaches to community involvement.