Devlog #1 - Malys & Early Access

Hi everybody!

My name is Liam Esler and I’m the Managing Director for Summerfall Studios and Project Director on Malys, our exorcism roguelite deckbuilder! Today, we released Malys into Early Access. I’m here to talk about what that means, why we made the decision to do so, and what comes next!

The Story So Far

Some of you know that we recently ran a Kickstarter campaign for Malys. The intention was to raise funds that would allow us additional time and resources to make Malys the best version it could possibly be before we brought it to our audience. We have always had a path to a 1.0 for Malys, but games like this live and die on their communities. It was a big swing that we took on a short timeline, and unfortunately we fell just short of the finish line. Being unsuccessful means the scope of what we can do for the game has changed, as well as affected the capacity we have as a team, but we meant what we said about launching Malys no matter what - so here we are!

Our desire for your feedback hasn’t waned. Every member of our team is working incredibly hard to make a great game, but we’re now in a position where we need to pick and choose what will get the most love and attention. So, in order to still get as much feedback as possible on where our focus should be, we’ve decided to invite players in earlier than we’d otherwise intended with an Early Access release of the game. The community response both to the game itself and to our team has been overwhelmingly kind, and even though Malys isn’t quite where we’d ideally like it to be for a public launch, we feel bringing this current version of the game to Early Access is the best step we can take.

Why Early Access

The feedback we can get from Early Access is invaluable, as well as the support from our audience to share and celebrate the game. This is very much a work in progress build of the game. Early Access on Steam in 2025 is nowadays games that are ‘mostly done’, excluding adding additional content. If you don’t want to play a version of the game that is in-progress, we don’t recommend buying this Early Access version and instead waiting for the 1.0. It’s worth knowing the price will increase after Early Access, so if you’d like to save some money, now is the time. We don’t have a demo up at this point in time, but it’s on our list so players who are unsure can test out if the experience is for them prior to committing with a purchase.

The game is playable throughout the first region, but we can’t promise you won’t encounter bugs. In order to give you time to play around with the deckbuilding elements being that only the first region is currently in game, we’ve extended that region slightly so you have more time to experiment before the end of a run. 

We’ve decided to focus on specific elements with each update, so that we can resolve specific areas based on community response step by step. We want to let you in even earlier than developers usually would for an Early Access build, but that means you’re seeing a build that is real and in development.

This build also has the majority of our planned core features, the first chunk of story content, and a variety of Cards and Curios to allow for different build possibilities. We want you to try everything - break the game - in your own clever ways, and then tell us how it felt!

Early Access - The Summerfall Way

We would not enter into Early Access if we didn’t think we could ship a 1.0 of Malys. This is our first time doing Early Access as a team, and we know we’re likely to get things not quite right. We really appreciate your patience. It might take us more time than we’d like to fix issues you encounter, and some may not be solvable with the resources we have. There’s a lot of prioritizing, scoping, discussing, and planning that comes with everything we run into. So, we’ve tried to set up a bit of clarity on how we’ll take your feedback and when you’ll hear from us - no confusion, no periods of silence.

Gameplay Updates

Gameplay updates will come about once every three weeks on Steam. These will be all about things we’re adding to the game - this might be adding new planned content, adjustments based on feedback we’ve gotten, or fixing bothersome bugs. This gives us some time to collect your feedback, figure out what’s possible, make plans and schedule changes, and do all the work involved in implementing what we select.

Check-Ins

Each week after a gameplay update, we’ll check in here and on Steam to let you know what we’re hearing in terms of feedback, and what we’re working on for the next update. This will be a quick chance to check in and let you know what’s possible and what’s next, and answer any major questions that have come up.

Hotfixes

The only bugs we’ll be fixing in between gameplay updates are the gamebreaking kind - crashes that make it impossible for large sections of players to play. Investigating specific issues with specifications players have or the more obscure, hard to find bugs won’t be the priority for this early access period. Why? Everything we add or change throughout this process has the potential to change how bugs manifest, so investigating too early into rarer issues can be time better spent developing a final version of the game that we can bugfix and polish in full.

Other Conversations

We’ll also still be active here and there on our socials and our newsletter telling you more about the game and sharing it with the public, but we’re focusing most of the conversation on these devlogs and our posts on Steam.

Feedback

When we release an update, the quickest way for us to understand what’s going on in game is by filling out one of two forms.

If you’ve got feedback on a certain build, you can submit it via this form.

If you’ve got a bug to report, you can submit it via this form.

We’ll be reading all your conversations, but we’ll generally be replying in our larger updates so we can focus all our team's time and energy onto the creation of the game itself.

We’re so excited to share Malys with you, and we hope you are too!

Speak soon,

Liam