Hello Commanders, 🪖
Deep Fringe enters Early Access with a solid core framework. Future mechanics and content are designed to meaningfully expand how the game is played.
This project was born from our long-standing passion for tactical strategy games. Throughout development, we constantly debated and tested core rules internally and brought early, rough prototypes to industry events to be challenged by experienced developers.
To better support complex terrain and multi-layered interactions, we made the difficult decision to rebuild our original 2D scenes into a fully 3D environment. To keep development moving forward, we deliberately cut many interesting ideas along the way. With a complete core framework now in place, those ideas are not lost, they are simply waiting for the right time to return.
We would like to thank players who have supported us since our first public reveal in 2024, especially those who joined our community early. We still remember a player who, in one of our very rough early builds, completed an entire level with a single unit left at one point of health, spending nearly an hour to succeed. That moment gave us the confidence to keep going.
We are equally grateful to players who spent hours with Deep Fringe at noisy convention halls. Your questions, feedback, and instinctive reactions during playtests provided invaluable information that directly shaped our improvements. 💌🫡
Tactical strategy games are often considered a niche. However, player feedback made one thing very clear to us - there is a dedicated audience that genuinely cares about this kind of experience. We are strategy players ourselves, and even knowing the market is smaller, we chose to continue developing Deep Fringe for that audience.
Rather than reshaping the game to fit broader expectations, we decided to move forward through Early Access and build directly alongside our players. This also meant making difficult choices. Due to funding and scheduling constraints, some planned features were postponed or cut. Our goal is to sustain development through Early Access, and keep refining and expanding it to reach the level of quality we believe it deserves.
The current version of Deep Fringe is still a work in progress. Alongside developing future content, we will be releasing weekly patches to fix bugs, improve stability, and refine the existing experience. We closely monitor all feedback and appreciate your patience as we improve the game step by step.
We know many of you are curious about our plans beyond Early Access, or may have concerns about what it means for the game or are simply afraid of the 'Early Access' stage. We completely understand, which is why we did not want to keep you waiting and have prepared an Early Access roadmap to share with you on day one. We'll keep refining this roadmap to ensure it aligns with your expectations, feedback and vision for Deep Fringe.
We initially planned a Kickstarter for Deep Fringe, but with Early Access ready and momentum from the March demo, we chose to launch Early Access directly. We're forever grateful to the early followers of the project there and hope you will follow us during this journey!
If you have feedback on gameplay or systems, please do not hesitate to let us know. While we continue developing future content, we will also be releasing weekly patches to address issues and improve the current experience.
If you encounter bugs or would like to share feedback, you can report them on Discord in the df-bugs or df-feedback channels, which we monitor closely. You can also share feedback through the Steam Community Hub.
Some skills and units are missing assets and special effects.
Certain visual and sound effects are not yet implemented.
Incorrect background music playback in some levels.
Incomplete parts of the story and branching content.
If you encounter any of these issues, or notice problems we may have missed, we encourage you to let us know. Your reports and feedback directly help us improve Deep Fringe throughout Early Access.
We are excited about the road ahead, and we hope to build the best possible tactical experience together with the community.