Early Access can feel like a minefield. Involving your player base in the game development process always bears certain risks. A vocal community is able to offer constructive feedback and greatly improve upon your ideas, but its demands can quickly become unreasonable or too hard to implement. Risking the ire of a large group of people heavily invested in your game is definitely not recommended.

It's a gamble worth taking, though - after all, this is what Early Access is for. Now, if you want to take this idea one step further, why not build a whole game around your players' ideas and demands"

Enter Croatian indie studio Little Green Men. Starting out as a tiny outfit, working on their first game from a kitchen table, they kept growing with every release until reaching a team size of 25. Their second release, tactical space simulator Starpoint Gemini 2, was one of Steam's first Early Access titles.
During development, the response from the game's player base was sheer overwhelming, leading to Little Green Men changing roughly 30% of the finished product to fit the whims of its community. The result, co-founder Mario Mihokovic claims, was definitely a better game.

Many suggestions could be implemented into Starpoint Gemini 2, but there were a lot of amazing ideas left after development wrapped up. These became the core of Little Green Men's third project: Starpoint Gemini Warlords. At the heart of these suggestions was the desire to have an additional s...