Why Early Access?

“To collect feedback for balancing and future levels and enemy types.

For this type of game, every level consists of one song with accompanying enemy types and spawn patterns. During early access, after every play run, the number of killed enemies and your score will be transmitted back to us. We then use this data to adjust the difficulty so that everyone has a chance at finishing the song while keeping the highscore leaderboards at a competitive difficulty level.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“For balancing the play experience, we need data from roughly 1000 play runs. This means that if 50 people join our early access and try 20 times each, then we will have enough data to finalize the balancing. We estimate to reach this goal by end of August.

Once the balancing is OK, we plan to add at least 4 more levels, meaning more songs, more enemy types and special area effects. Every level will take roughly 1 month for us to compose or license the music, design the enemies, and to set a baseline difficulty. Afterwards, we'll need some play runs for each new level to finish balancing.

This leaves us with the following estimated timeline:

1 fully balanced level: End of August 2019
1 playable level + 1 fully balanced level: End of September 2019
1 playable level + 2 fully balanced levels: End of October 2019
1 playable level + 3 fully balanced levels: End of November 2019
1 playable level + 4 fully balanced levels: End of December 2019
5 fully balanced levels: End of January 2020

Accordingly, the estimated end of early access will be January 2020.”

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

“We plan to balance the current song so that beginners can succeed with a bit of practice. Afterwards, we plan to add at least 4 more levels, meaning more songs, more enemy types and special area effects.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“One song = one level is fully playable.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“We plan to increase the price a bit with each added level. So we'll most likely hike the price by a few percents every month.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“We believe that the current state of the game is very enjoyable, highly competitive, and short-lived enough that you can squeeze it into your lunch break.

We know that to grow into a proper game, we will need additional levels and better balancing. But we would still like to get this out to you, the gamers, in this rough form, so that you can enjoy it. That's why we are offering it on early access for cheap, because we don't have enough content for a full game yet, and we'd like to hear your suggestions for which content we should add.

We also need better balancing, so after every play run, the number of killed enemies and your score will be transmitted back to us. We then use this data to adjust the difficulty so that everyone has a chance at finishing the song while keeping the highscore leaderboards at a competitive difficulty level.

We plan to add 4 more levels, meaning 4 additional songs. From the style, each song needs to fit the retro / arcade / electronic / energy theme of the game, but we're happy to take community suggestions. That said, it might be very difficult for us to acquire licenses to use well-known songs inside the game, but we'll try.

We'll be using the Steam Community Forums for feedback and discussions.”