Multiple reasons why we couldn't (or wouldn't want to) do this;
- As the game has been separated by levels all the way up until about early this year, there would have been no way to have "five playable demos" in Early Access, so the game would have come off as being much more incomplete than it actually was (if Steam even allowed us to put it up there in split levels as-is).
- Early Access is something you generally need to do very early on; the way Steam handles visibility periods, wishlists, and so forth for Early Access is very different than it is for normal releases. TL;DR if we switched to Early Release right now, we'd probably cut our profits in half, at the very least, because Early Access depends on people purchasing the game in exchange for far less visbility from Steam/visibility periods (algorithmically).
- Early Access is also something that would draw us right back into the trap that we had set for ourselves unintentionally with Patreon, which is that we'd need to provide frequent
playable builds, which eats up development time massively. When you do a playable build, you need to "close the game up" so to speak; everything needs to work for the most part, existing programming needs to get "snipped" so it performs cleanly, writing needs to be checked, etc. to have a presentable thing that isn't just a mess of "in-progress" parts, especially for something that's going to likely get spread around the internet. We wanted to charge forward with development as fast as possible, which is why we also stopped the monthly demos on Patreon.
- Given the way we've setup stuff, it would likely lead to a lot of complaints from people playing early access, as perception of what was complete/what was missing would likely be very deceptive without the context of how our development process is setup.
For clarification on that last note, I've got something like 100 cutscenes left to plug into the game. Now, if you played the game at this point, you'd be missing all these cutscenes and such, and think that we're months or even years behind.
However, just yesterday, while writing more cutscenes/ripping audio, I also managed to get 10 cutscenes plugged into the game.
This is because not only is the writing/audio/art done for these scenes, but the way I've been writing them is a "manual-parsing" system (where I copy-paste this info for the most part, box by box, into the game). It requires a lot of initial setup as I'm writing the scenes, but when it comes time to plug them into the game, it makes it ridiculously fast to do so.
Here's a screenshot of one scene as an example;
View attachment 2080433
With this, I've got;
- Talia's emotions listed (for the emotion selector in-game)
- The NPC's general mood down (for whatever visual emotions I want to give them in-game)
- Flags set and checked
- Ideal values added and subtracted
- Choices in the cutscene
- Entity actions (movement, directional changes, damage taken/given, and a lot of other things)
- Voice filenames so I can just quickly eye what voicelines are attached to what script lines
- "Blue lines" so I know what lines are repeated between cutscene tabs, so I can quickly clone them between tabs
So hopefully all of that clarifies some stuff.
If they did this, then they didn't have a store page up on Steam at the time they released to Epic.
That, or they were a huge AAA publisher/developer and had the weight to swing around to ignore policy.
