Pitching this game was never easy.

It's been called everything from a 'vertical-scrolling action game with cyberpunk elements' to a 'retro-arcade, hacker, roguelite that feels like you're playing like a game of billiards for your life'. Personally, I like to think it's about falling with style.

Everyone says that you don't sleep when you have a child.

We released the proper alpha for Eves Drop in March about nine months after our first brainstorming session. In the sweltering July heat, Eves Drop was a mere shadow of what it would become. Daily chats led to weekly, structured meetings; weekly meetings became twice-weekly meetings; weeks became months and our vision for the game quickly grew from "a quick, three-month project" to "we might actually have something here".

We'd learned from past projects about the consequences of project bloat, great ideas that grow as they draw people in only to be left by the wayside once the reality of deadlines and sacrifices set in, and we were determined to stay lean even if that meant it would just be the two of us from here on out. But this didn't mean that we couldn't think big.

It all began with a hook: Free-falling through cyberspace

The minutes from our early meetings are pages upon pages of the wild, unfettered and unordered, bullet-pointed ravings of two best friends with the power of creation at their fingertips: Hours of trans-Atlantic conversations; text messages, Discord forums, phone calls, video chats, screen shares; late nights and early mornings; the visceral sense of the excitement undertaking a new project. In the early days, we threw everything we could at the game, slept on it and then came back with our cuts or tweaks. Our notes have comments. Our comments have comments. Our comments' comments have notes. Always building and adapting as the idea grew from a premise, to a few shapes floating on the screen, to a playable demo, an alpha and, now, the beta release.

The game, from it's inception, has stayed true to itself and it's almost shocking to look back at the early days and see just how much of our initial ideas have lasted through iteration upon iteration of major mechanical and visual reinvention. As game developers, we've grown with the game, too, and accomplished more in one year than we had in the nearly ten years of collaboration that preceded it. We remained dedicated to our meeting schedules, set our budgets and made tough cuts even at the expense of hours of dev time we would never get back. We even interviewed, hired, and paid two incredibly talented freelancers from across the globe to create wholly original artwork and music for the game within our limited, out-of-pocket budget.

Phase Two is now complete

With the release of this beta, we're confident that players will be able to truly feel the excitement, tension and fun that have kept us coming back to this project every week for the past year.

Before our final release at the end of Summer 2019, we're hoping getting any feedback including gameplay videos, screenshots, suggestions and even complaints. The link above is for a really accessible Google Form that takes almost no time to fill out.

Also, please join our Discord. We'd love to meet you and hear what you think of the game!

-Jake and Drew