Ancient Forge tells us about Hotel Galactic's full launch plans and how it encourages players to treat "employees as our family"

As part of our stint in Portugal for DevGAMM, we had the luxury to chat with all manner of different game developers and creators, not least Hotel Galactic studio Ancient Forge. We sat down with producer Ida Szczecinska to learn more about the cosy management project, which recently arrived on Steam in its Early Access form.

As part of the full and locally subtitled interview that you can see below, we asked Szczecinska about how the developer has designed its management systems to handle the employee dynamic and hiring, caring for, and even moving on from staff members.

"Well, we want to see the employees as our family," Szczecinska began. "Yeah, this is often a joke for us, that we hire employees, and we say like, oh, they're sleeping with us, but do this, do that, clean that, bring this, and we are only task givers in the game. But the whole impression of the workers is that they stay with you, they learn skills, and they actually grow old with you. So, when they grow old, you can give them retirement, but what's good to use this time when they are older as employees is to actually start a mentoring programme. You can hire a new employee that has zero skill set, and you send them on the mentoring adventure, literally, when they get up more skills with the older employee to keep your hotel in a good level of performance. So, this is the whole cycle of employee, it's pretty long, it's not like your employees get old in a week, you need to stay them, train them, and then let them know, pass the knowledge to the next generation of the hotel staff."

Building on this we inquired about the development of Hotel Galactic and where Ancient Forge is in relation to the production and improvement of the game while in Early Access.

"Right now our game is in Early Access, we [went] Early Access this summer, and at this moment we are collecting the feedback, we are checking how it's seen by the players, our game, and we already know where is the place to improve, and we are taking it very seriously. Right now we are working on rework that will make the gameplay smooth, of course debugging of the whole game, but also extending the content to deliver more gameplay to our players. So, right now we have tons of work, there is a rework going on, and we are planning to finish it in December this year.

"So, right now we have tons of work. December is one of our goals to show the players the improvement that we made from the Early Access, and honestly the next step is to start thinking about full release next year."

With improvements planned for December and the hopes to start thinking about the full launch next year, Szczecinska told us about how Ancient Forge is approaching publishing the game and even bringing it to other platforms.

"Right now we are open for communication, also about porting." Szczecinska adds, "right now we are only on Steam, and on Steam Deck also, we are available on Steam Deck. But we are also thinking to go to other platforms."

Again, you can see the full interview with Szczecinska below for more information on Hotel Galactic, which you can also play today on Steam in its Early Access state.