This is a deeper dive considering how and when we might release Free Stars: Children of Infinity in different versions written as a companion piece to our Milestone 7 Update. Read that first for some context.

Long Breakdown

This section is going to be very information-dense and educational as we walk all the way through our decision process. If you aren’t interested in a deep dive on these kinds of decisions, feel free to skip ahead to the next section! Regardless of some universal, technical terminology, let’s just agree for the sake of this explanation, there are a few types of releases with specific names and specific targets:

Playtest: Something meant to represent the final result but clearly not finished, where we’re mostly focusing on getting feedback and observing results. There may be missing guardrails (e.g. things which prevent you from getting the program into a bad state, icky bugs) and places where we’d need a player to consult some documentation or ask questions if they’re confused. We might want to direct players to a specific experience because that’s the part we’re testing. We wouldn’t expect someone to necessarily want to buy and play the game after this.
Demo: Something meant to represent the final game which feels finished, even if the player can’t experience all of it (e.g. a time limit, the story or progression reaching a terminal point). It is implicitly cost-free to the player as an enticing sample of what’s to come. We would want someone to play this and leave wanting more, saying, “Wow, this is awesome! I can’t wait to buy and play this game and tell all my friends and enemies about it!”
Early Access: Something meant to represent the final result, finished enough to be coherent, and with a clearly described path toward completion. In some ways, we are focused on feedback by saying we are hungry for people to play the game even unfinished, but in other ways, we also want someone who plays this to feel like they’re getting a full experience. Players who play this would either be willing to accept some unfinished things (e.g. the complete story not being playable) or happy to see small pieces of what is done, but we would want those players to be excited to come back and see what’s new when we are finished. It’s not a necessary component, but similar to a Kickstarter, this also can be a way for interested players to support a developer financially. “Infinite” Early Access exists, but for our purposes, we would plan on a fixed time with a schedule of planned features to take us toward 1.0.

There is far more comprehensive information and case studies from other developers on these different types of release plans than we can manage to include here, so we’ll just put in a few of our most important considerations: who’s playing, what options they have after playing it, and when they could exercise those options. Let’s use our Melee Playtest version as an example with the lens of these three types of releases as a starting point! Pretend we didn’t just explicitly call it a playtest and think of it for a moment as a Melee-Only Version.

As a playtest, our Melee version would be focused on getting tons of feedback from players and doing pseudo-QA testing! We’d want to see what players have fun with in Melee, where they struggle, and what they feel after playing it. Our technology, proven internally every day albeit with a limited subset of users, would be in the hands of more people and we could find many things that way. We wouldn’t be worried about players wanting to come back for more, and we could leave half-finished and unfinished things in as needed. As a playtest, this would likely have no “network effect” where players would play and then go tell someone to play it too unless we actually do some kind of wider “open playtest” where new people could join in (not likely valuable for a team our size). There would be no guarantee on when the finished version would be available.

As a demo, our Melee version would be focused on selling the game! We’d want players to play something more limited than the full version of the game but which still represents what the game is about. You might see where this falls down quickly, as Melee alone is not representative of the whole game! It would be unfortunate if someone were to have the exact experience I had as a kid, where I played UQM’s Melee and then only found out there was a great story to play many years later. If someone loves Melee and just wants to play that, this would still work out for them. However, since there’s so much more to the game, and it’s something we’re investing a lot of energy into, this runs the risk of accidentally alienating a possible player who would be interested in the Adventure mode.

As an early access, our Melee version would be focused on getting players in the door and using Melee as a launching point for the rest of our features. Similar to the demo, we can see that it may not make sense since Melee doesn’t represent the whole game. Unlike a demo, which is intended to be a taste test for the player, an early access version may provide a clearer idea of what may be missing or coming later, since part of an early access release is like what we’ve done with our Kickstarter, where we actually endeavor to describe the final product that’s coming since players can’t experience it yet. It’s still a little weak since Melee is meant to stand alone (unlike Planetside alone, or HyperSpace alone, etc.).

Now, let’s apply this same rubric to our Adventure Lite version!

As a playtest, our Adventure Lite would, similarly to a Melee Playtest, be focused on getting feedback from players. In this case, it would simply be across a broader area. We could see how players react to the core parts of our adventure gameplay and if they can follow the story and figure out how to navigate and progress through it. If a player had never played Melee before, we could even see how they fare being tossed into challenging combat. If we’re excited for players to experience the story they’ve been looking forward to, this wouldn’t be for them since we’d be focused more on information-gathering. This would be the earliest we think a player could understand the adventure mode and would give us the best opportunity to make changes or additions.

As a demo, our Adventure Lite would be focused on a preview of the whole game. Missing features like Gas Giant Gameplay could simply be placeholders for things the player would get to experience in a more complete version of the game. Though we would be excluding features which are representative of the full experience, we wouldn’t want the game to feel like those things were just missing or unfinished. They’d be teasers for what’s to come. Unlike Melee as a demo, this version does a much better job since it has the ability to fire on all cylinders and give players a taste of the real game, which is far more than just Melee.

As an early access, Adventure Lite would be the first rung on a ladder to a complete game for a player. Like a demo, missing features would be signposted as things which would come later, and we would communicate the schedule of when those features arrive. We’d want to use this opportunity to get interested players in and observe what happens, like with the playtest, but we would want the experience to be complete and satisfying enough that we can leverage the network effect of them telling other players about it and helping us reach more players. Not having multiplayer co-op could be a negative to using this version as Early Access, since players couldn’t tell others about it with a message like “Come play this with me!” It’s very easy to see how the flow of our own development creates a cumulative experience for players as new features get added to this version. First, vertically, with gameplay being added, and then horizontally, with the complete story being done in Adventure Full.

Lastly (I swear, this is the last one!), let’s do the exercise for Adventure Medium just to illustrate how these options can turn into strategies. For most intents and purposes the statements here could also be about Adventure Full.

As a playtest, Adventure Medium would have a much, much larger section of the game completed for players to experience. Since it’s possible in this scenario that we already did a playtest of one of our other versions, we’d be looking to source information on the new gameplay experiences to help us tune them. There would be no additional story beyond Adventure Lite, so the story testing would be the same.

As a demo, Adventure Medium would be essentially the same as Adventure Lite. The messaging for players would be entirely around the hard stop in the story and we’d want players to be motivated to get the full version of the game to play through it. We’d want to make sure the story is an enticing and attractive element since it’s almost the only thing we’d be withholding.

As an early access, Adventure Medium is also about the same as Adventure Lite. It just provides a different starting point. Because it does include multiplayer co-op, it would have one advantage since playing together could be a selling point. Many players can be happier to experience an incomplete thing since the social aspect provides a great amplifier to the fun they have.

Before we move on, we just want to float one sideways possibility: what if the Melee Demo is actually the Melee Giveaway? Not to get too off-topic with what is just a twist, but there is indeed the wild notion of just having Melee be its own, fully-supported and thing we don’t even describe as a Demo for this game. We can even use a different title, if we want. Shogun Showdown released a free version called Shogun Showdown: Prologue, for example. There’s some appeal to this! It avoids some of the problems with making Melee a Demo, since it would be separate and not trying to represent the story experience. We like that it would let more people experience Melee and have fun with it forever. If you purchased the full game but wanted to introduce a friend to Melee who didn’t have the game by playing with them, you could do that. It could encourage modding, too. One big challenge with doing this is that, somewhat counter-intuitively, giving something away reduces its perceived value! It’s easy for someone to believe that if we don’t charge money for something, it must not be worth anything. (Weird, I know!)

Weapon of Choice

As you can see from reading the above, there are a lot of options, and all of them can have different impacts on our game. To oversimplify a bit, there are three main avenues where these choices can create impacts positive and negative:

Players: a better, more complete game is a better, more complete game! For some players, being part of a playtest and contributing to development is also fun. For some players, even seeing a game has or was an early access is a turn-off. Playing a demo can, counter-intuitively, convince a player not to buy the game since the try before they would buy was enough to tell them the game wasn’t for them.
Community: the moment there is a game everyone can play is the moment we can include everyone in our community! When thinking about bringing new players into our community and getting people interested in the game, having something playable, especially something people can play together like Melee, gives people a reason to show up. It’s awesome to see how many people are still talking about the fun they had or are still having with UQM, and we think even more people new and old will be happy to participate in something fresh. It would be a net negative, however, if we don’t create a great environment for people to interact or aren’t participating in and supporting our community because we are too busy, for example.
Us and the Game’s Success: playtesting, QA, and time spent polishing is incredibly valuable to us when trying to make something cool. If we are able to follow a strategy which creates a great game, we want to do that! The better our game is, the more it makes everything… well, better. We’re not ready to throw in the towel after this game, so its success will afford us future possibilities.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely a backer of our project, which means you are one of the coolest, most likable people on the planet. It also means that there’s no purchasing consideration for you, since you’re already getting a copy of the game whenever it becomes available. For console players, you know that you will be getting later, but for PC players, all of these options could be available to you.

Believe it or not, I really do read everything people say in comments here and in our Discord as well as on Bluesky and on our Subreddit. Sometimes I’m slow to respond, but I read your emails too! This is one of those cases where I have been keeping track of various sentiments people have shared and have seen a couple predominant ones:

“Take your time!” Some people seem happy to wait and just want to play the best, most finished version of the game possible. We might assume they’re Adventure mode players, but it’s possible that’s not the case! They might even not be reading these updates because they don’t want spoilers.
“How can I be a part of this?” Some people actively want to help and be involved even past just the Kickstarter. Whether we’ve gotten voice acting submissions, offers to help with localization, and all kinds of things big and small, we have a really passionate, excited group of people who want us all to feel successful and want to contribute to that success.

Is there a way to answer the questions about if we want to release our versions to wider groups of people somewhere in there? How much of the above expression is geared toward creating a setup for people who would be interested in being part of a Playtest or Early Access? Is there an even better plan than our original one (just finish the game and release it) which gives everyone what they want, including making the game better?

Seriously, we’re curious: what would you think? Would you be excited to just play a version of the game which is only Melee? Would you want to play the game without voice acting? What about just a part of the story? If you have thoughts and feelings, I will read them!

We covered some of the considerations above, especially as they relate to people who hadn’t already purchased the game, and how having something playable but not finished could actually make our game less appealing to people when we’re trying to market it. There is also the general wisdom that we want to make as much noise as possible with a singular message and push: our game is out! We want to spend our time and funds getting the word out well.

If we did a traditional Early Access, for example, that hamstrings that potential a little. Of course we can have a push with the 1.0 release, but it also means many of you might have already played it. We’d need to be very clear about the Early Access plan, make sure the first Early Access release does provide a satisfying experience worth hyping up to others, and truly give people a reason to come back. Even then, there’s a lot of games vying for your and everyone’s attention.

One last thing to consider is the difference between getting feedback and responding to or reacting to feedback. If we are doing playtesting, we’re setting aside time to gather information and use it to make the game better. If we release something but are still busy making more stuff ahead of it for a future release, then it will also divert our attention from playtesting. It’s nicer to have dedicated time where we can just incorporate what we learn.

If you want to let us know what you think, share it on our Milestone 7 Update or with us on Discord, Bluesky, or Reddit.