Seven days ago we launched on Steam early access. It has been a frantic hundred hour week and finally the dust is starting to settle. Eight hundred emails answered, many more waiting, forty patches distributed, two hundred gigabytes of content uploaded and ten thousand lines of code hammered out. Phew!
Releasing such an early build was a risk, but I still strongly believe in community driven development and the launch has definitely vindicated my thinking. We've completely transformed the game since release and it's entirely thanks to you guys! I really want to thank everyone who took to the forums, and email, and who submitted their problems, their feedback and their ideas.
The launch exceeded all our expectations, in fact it blew them away. We certainly didn't expect to be featured on the front page of Steam for so long. We spent several days outselling games like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty at one point we even became the #2 seller.
In just four days Maia received enough alpha sales to budget the game to completion. We have now grossed over half a million dollars in backer funding. It's something I couldn't have imagined two years ago when I first started tinkering with the idea of an alpha release.
Update time!
Rezzed
Just over a month ago we showed the game at Eurogamer Rezzed in Birmingham. It was pretty intense dealing with the booth, we had solid crowds for most of the three days and hundreds of people played the game. I've thrown some of the photos I took up on Flikr.
Although I've gotten pretty good at pitching the game, I am still dreadful at talking in front of cameras or microphones...
We got a huge amount of interest in the game and lots and lots of feedback on the builds. It really helped me to prioritize and fix a lot of the rough edges in the game. Thanks to all the everyone who showed up and said hi!
Development
0.42 has been out just under a week. It's a pretty huge update so I won't go into it here, but it's certainly worth checking out. If you haven’t seen it yet here's a brief video overview:
Since then I've spent a lot of effort hunting down the few remaining crash bugs. As of this afternoon we have no replicable critical issues on the tracker.
We already have a lot of things in development for future builds. My favourite thing right now is the second creature, a creepy nocturnal burrowing critter that is going to make the game just a little bit more disconcerting.
I'll be doing a live stream at some point this week. I'll post an update here a few hours before hand so people can tune in and ask me some questions.
Goodnight!
-Simon
Maia is currently in early alpha. A playable alpha release will be available as soon as late January. The game will run on Windows, Mac and Linux and have absolutely no DRM.
The game will ship in summer 2013. After that, development will continue indefinitely, with regular updates, and swathes of new content every month.
Considering that after 18 months he is now at 0.42 it will take until late 2016 until he ships 1.0
ortucis Rimworld. Not yet there in terms of complexity, but very fun to play. And the art style is practically lifted from PA. Good thing if you ask me, everything is nice and readable.
The guy fucked us all, he used this to fund his PhD and gave us a bit of a garbage game
Afaik, that rating is mostly from the old states of the game (which was VERY buggy), but supposedly the most recent version fixed a lot of that.The 70s aesthetic is absolutely sublime and we badly need far more contemporary sci-fi with such aesthetics, but looks don't make a game.