To be honest, I still can’t quite believe it.
After years of development, countless hours of programming, planning, scrapping ideas, rebuilding, testing and probably far too many cups of coffee, today marks a moment I’ve been waiting for for an incredibly long time:
Startelf is playable.
It’s still ‘just’ an open alpha. There are bugs, things aren’t working quite as they should yet, some features are missing entirely, and there are still plenty of changes to come in many areas.
But even so, it’s a huge step for me.
It’s the beginning of a vision for a football management game unlike any that has come before, and at the heart of it lies the role-based concept, which is designed to allow players to take on a wide variety of roles within a football club.
Because what started as an idea that popped into my head one day, combined with many lines of code and countless evenings and weekends of work, has now become a fully playable football management game.
And now you can actually play it yourselves.
That means an incredible amount to me.
The Steam Playtest marks the start of a completely new phase for Startelf. I no longer want to just develop and test it on my own, but to see what you make of it, what you like, what you feel is missing, where you encounter problems and, above all: whether you enjoy Startelf as much as I do.
The Open Alpha is just the beginning.
Startelf will be released in Early Access on Steam in the fourth quarter of 2026.
There’s still an incredible amount to do before then. But today, I’d just like to pause for a moment and say:
Thank you to everyone who has supported me and Startelf on this journey so far.
An absolutely incredible number of people have joined me on this journey, and most of them are still active on my Discord – some have been for many years! I’m really looking forward to continuing to develop the game with them and, hopefully, with some new people too!
And now…
Let’s play Startelf.