EDIT: A quick note to the above – we are still testing save games this weekend, with an eye to getting the last few bugs out. If you would like to try them, please switch your Steam build to the experimental branch – the version number should be “30B” – and let us know how it goes. We’ll let you know when the official release goes out here, and via e-mail if you are on our mailing lists. Sorry for the delay – hunting mysterious crash bugs and fixing things is time consuming business. — Nicholas
I think it’s always a miracle when a video game actually gets released, in any form. It’s also a very weird feeling having three years of work launched, for a product that is not complete yet – but there it is, we are in Early Access. The trick now, of course, is to get Clockwork Empires out of Early Access – and that is what we will be focusing on next.
Common pastoral scenes from players’ Early Access experience.
With regards to Earliest Access: it very much appears to have been the right decision. We launched on Steam in a pretty good state and ended up with only a few issues that we were unaware of. We have seen some excellent streams of Clockwork Empires appearing on Twitch and people have put up some wonderful YouTube videos that invariably end with everybody being eaten. It is also nice to do an early access launch for the simple fact that it had none of the Sheer Terror! that accompanied the launch of Dungeons of Dredmor, or any of our expansion packs. I would highly recommend Earliest Access as a thing for people considering Early Access to do: in terms of our primary goal of having the smoothest launch possible into Early Access, it seems to have worked perfectly. Many of the improvements we put in the game between Earliest Access and Early Access are a result of the diligent feedback of players and their willingness to criticize/talk about their experiences. As always, we thank you for your support.
Similarly we’re now seeing some excellent suggestions through Early Access on our Steam forums, which we are currently working our way through.
With that said, how do we get OUT of Early Access? The plan going forward is as follows.
