If you’re creative enough, you may even design your own buildings. You start off with a couple of villagers (described in-game as hearthlings) and slowly gather resources, build new houses and defend yourself from orcs, goblins, wolves and other invaders. Stonehearth is primarily a survival town builder and simulator, heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress and various Sim games by Maxis. It is currently available in early access on Steam and has been since 2015. This indie sandbox game by Radiant Entertainment showed up on Kickstarter in 2013 and quickly gained the attention of backers, who pledged over $750,000, vastly exceeding its original $120,000 goal.

Below you’ll find a collection of just such stories. There are many examples of early access games failing to become what they were advertised as or falling into development hell. Having people’s money involved from the start leads to higher expectations, which is often burdensome for smaller indie studios. While many of them succeed, some tend to have more trouble delivering on their promises than others.Īsking players to support a game before it’s finished can certainly benefit developers, but taking that route may be problematic as well. Tweet Early access games have been around at least since Mount & Blade in one form or another, but they have become far more common since the popularization of various crowdfunding platforms and the success of Minecraft.

Stonehearth game villages