I spent most of the last week testing and fixing bugs in preparation for the next round of Closed Betas. By Wednesday I had a release candidate and have now started to send out batches of invites. So far, I've already received a lot of valuable feedback. There do not appear to be any serious game-breaking bugs that should prevent the larger beta from proceeding, so I'll be sending out additional larger rounds of invites over the weekend.
One person reported the invite being flagged as spam, so double-check your spam folder.
If you don't get an invite, don't worry, there will be more rounds before the game enters Early Access. Also, there's another opportunity for playtesters:
Observing a player experience the game for the first time visually can sometimes identify issues that analytics data and feedback submissions can't. During the development of Starcom: Nexus, there were issues that I identified for the first time only after watching a player play the game at a convention. I haven't done any conventions for Starcom: Unknown Space, so I'm lacking data in this area.
If you know how to record and upload a video playthrough to YouTube, but haven't received an invite, let me know by emailing me at [email protected] and I'll get you access. You don't need to be a professional streamer: I just want to observe some candid first-time player experiences.
One final note, there are a number of Steam key "scammers" who try to get keys not to play games, but to resell the keys after the game launches. To combat this, all playtest keys are not for resale: they activate the playtest product version.
- Kevin