Early Access Release

We're finally here! Freefall is now officially released into Early Access! I feel I should begin immediately with an apology. Freefall was originally in development back in 2015 but, due to reasons I won't go into here, I halted work on the game until March this year. I wish the game could have seen the light of day much sooner, but I'm thrilled to have been given that opportunity later than never. Since March, I've been working really hard to get the game up-to-scratch for a release, but I have to admit that the game isn't as far along as I'd hoped it would be by now, partially due to some bugs that took crazy lengths of time to resolve. Nonetheless, I'm not going to delay the release, as all the stuff that didn't make it will still be completed during Early Access. I'm going to be posting a detailed overview of what's currently in the game as well as everything that's planned throughout Early Access, but for now, here's a summary of the current status.

The level gameplay is provisionally complete, by which I mean it's in an acceptable state but may undergo additions and tweaks throughout Early Access.

The Steam Controller API is fully supported. This should work with any Steam Controllers, PS4 controllers, Xbox controllers, and generic gamepad controllers enabled through Steam Big Picture mode.

A bunch of graphics effects have been added. These are all cosmetic but the intention is to allow players to tailor the aesthetic of the game to their precise liking. More of these will come later down the line, but for now functionality is more important than beauty.

Three provisional levels have been included with the release. These will almost certainly undergo tweaks and changes, but the principle of each level should remain the same.

Game options are stored in Steam Cloud, and performance-related graphics options like Base Detail are stored per-machine to avoid syncing high-quality options to a low-performance machine.

Provisional achievements for total time played in-game have been added. These are not necessarily final, but they probably won't change much, and more achievements will be coming soon.

Leaderboards are under construction, but I'm still trying to figure out the best way to handle these. I'd like custom user levels at some point down the line, and it seems like a shame not to enable leaderboards for these, if possible. More investigation required! I've tried to test the game on a variety of different devices to make sure it runs efficiently and actually works at all, and I want to give many thanks to the team of play-testers who have given me feedback and worked with me to debug various graphical and gameplay issues. Having said that, I can't imagine that there are no remaining bugs, gameplay issues, unintuitive features, etc, so if you have any feedback, please don't hesitate to open up a thread in the Freefall Community Hub and I'll see what I can do to resolve your issue. Until next time, happy falling!