Stardock Entertainment’s The Video Game Machine has entered into alpha testing for those who put money down on the game early to join the founder’s program. This is reserved for people who wanted to play-test the game ahead of its official launch on PC.

The alpha testing began on May 29th, 2019 at the end of last month, where gamers who rolled out $9.99 to get in early were able to boot it up and mess around with the fledgling aspects of the game.

The whole point of the alpha test ahead of the public release is so that Stardock can tweak and fine-tune some aspects of the toolset. Lead designer Scott Tykoski explained in the press release…

“Player feedback is so important at this stage. The game has been designed to be easy enough that anyone can create their own games while still having enough power that savvy gamers can create truly unique games with it. We want to make sure that everyone is having a good time and that the process for creating is as intuitive as we want it to be.”

The core utility will allow gamers to create 8-bit or 16-bit style games ranging from isometric adventure titles to side-scrolling platformers.

The design of The Video Game Machine is themed around accessibility and ease-of-use. Gamers will be able to choose a basic template layout, the kind of hero they want for their game, the kind of assets they want to use, and then they can very easily and conveniently put together games within different genres very similar to Maxis’ Klick ‘n Play.

Access to the game’s alpha phase is currently still available for those who want to give it a run. The founder’s program access is live for $9.99 over on the official Stardock website.

Alternatively you can wait for the game to finish its early access phase and launch in full on PC when all the kinks and wrinkles are ironed out.