Neverending Nightmares Console Alpha is here!

Hello, my name is Matt Gilgenbach, of Infinitap Games, and I’m the lead developer on Neverending Nightmares. Neverending Nightmares is a psychological horror game that is inspired by the real horror of my battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. The main character, Thomas, keeps waking up from a nightmare into another crazier nightmare. As you journey through the game, you have to try to piece together what is “real” and what is a manifestation of the player’s psychological state.

Here is a trailer:

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You may have difficulty imagining what the game may play like. That’s understandable – the game is really trippy! Fortunately, you can play some of the game right now on OUYA even though we are far from release. We currently have an alpha (well, really pre-alpha) build up on the OUYA store that you can try and buy. While that might not seem that interesting to you, I’ve spent my professional game development career working on other consoles, and no other console gives the developer as much control over how they want to release their game as OUYA does.

This level of control is really awesome as a developer and really helps me create a better game. Neverending Nightmares was successfully kickstarted 4 months ago, and being able to get feedback from backers has been extremely helpful to shape the game. On my previous game, Retro/Grade, I could only get focus test data from people who had expensive dev kits or at trade shows. Now, I can push a build out and find out what hundreds of people think about the game. Getting feedback from players on early builds gives me more tools to make a better game.

Now you might say that early access on a console isn’t THAT exciting since you could do that on computers, but I would argue that consoles attract a different audience. I play plenty of PC games, but I consider myself a console gamer. I like to sit in front of my TV, start a game, and have it instantly work. I don’t want to worry about updating drivers and setting graphics options to try and get the best experience on my machine. While I will jump through those hoops to play a really great game, I’d rather get the console experience where you can get right into the game. I suspect I’m not the only one who prefers playing on consoles rather than PCs. Being able to give us console gamers the same early access that PC users can get is awesome, and something that you can only do on OUYA!

So how does Neverending Nightmares early access work? For $35, you can get the current alpha build on OUYA and all future builds and updates including the released game. When we reach beta, you can get access to it and future builds for $25. Finally, when the game releases, it will be $15.

Early access is a strange beast. Some people feel it should be less expensive because you are helping the developer find bugs and are playing an incomplete game. To others, it is worth more because you have the privilege of giving your input to help shape the game as it takes form. Because we did a kickstarter, we had higher reward tiers with early access, so we are continuing that trend to be fair to our backers.

Is that the best way to do early access? I don’t know. This style of development is the “wild west”, and I’m not sure anyone knows what the best way to approach this is. However, we feel that things are going quite well with our current plan, so we are going to continue with it. If $35 is a turnoff, I completely understand. You can wait for us to finish the game and enjoy it then. If you’d like to help us fund the rest of development as well as provide us with your feedback on what you’d like the game to be, then perhaps backing now is right for you.

Either way, check out the new demo content, and I hope you keep Neverending Nightmares on your radar because I think we are putting together a really special game! If you’d like to see more of what you get in the alpha build, then here is a video:

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-Matt Gilgenbach