Another Indie Game has done it, with a stealth launch hitting the market before everyone was expecting it. Orion Trail is the kickstarted sci-fi space adventure game that raised over $95 000 and pays homage to past titles, such as Star Trek and Oregon Trail, and was expected to launch roughly two months from now. As you may have guessed though ... it's now out on Steam.
Orion Trail had been in Early Access for several months already, getting updates to help fix balancing and several other issues. However, after that time they felt they had achieved what they wanted from Early Access and have decided to release the game into the wild for people to see, with a 30% launch discount, setting it to $6.99, or $3 off it's normal $9.99 price tag.
If you hadn't heard of Orion Trail, no worries as it's not a huge title despite the successful crowdfunding and inspirations. It is a pixel art game that also draws inspiration from rogue-lite titles, such as FTL, for how it works and a lot of puns as the game showed in its kickstarter prototype. There are over 50 unique encounters, 30 mini-encounters, 70 events, and 6 away missions that make up the game, giving it potentially a good amount of variety.
Additionally, the developers confirmed that just because they are leaving Early Access, that doesn't mean they are finished working on Orion Trail. In one of their posts to backers, they stated:
Just because we’re launching doesn’t mean we will stop supporting the game. We’ll be adding new (free) content to the game, fixing bugs, and still responding to feedback for at least a month after our official launch.
That's good news for those who want more variety in the game after launch, which can always be a problem for games that rely on random encounters. They also addressed some of the community's want for a hunting minigame, or other skill based ones that they failed to reach the stretch goal for, saying that if there is enough interest in the game after launch, they will continue working on implementing them. Essentially, it's a money issue on working on those and they would like to include them, so if the title does well, they hope to be able to update it in.
They also recently revealed their next project that another team at their studio will be doing and is coming to kickstarter later today, The Nullpoint. That title is meant to be a sci-fi, real-time-tactics survival horror roguelike mash of every buzz word you can think of while you scavenge for supplies and try to find out what is happening. You can see the trailer below or get the prototype on their website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45EtwO_2gvE 
