Hello! Firstly, thanks for playing our game :) I am genuinely shocked at how much you all seem to like Beastieball!
The Experimental Branch
I wanted to introduce players to our Experimental branch, which will be the game's home for frequent updates after the initial rush of release bug fixes starts winding down. You can access alternate game branches by Right clicking the game in your Library > Properties > "Betas" tab > Select a branch of the game to subscribe to.
Going forward, our intention will be to patch major content updates to the release build occasionally, but update the experimental branch frequently with whatever we're working on. Sometimes this will mean new Beastie art progress, and sometimes it'll mean experimental mechanic changes or bugfixes that we aren't ready to show everybody yet. We won't always post updates about changes coming to the experimental branch; we'll just keep tinkering on the game there in peace and when there's a lot cool stuff that's built up and well-tested, we'll put it on the release branch and shout about it to everyone.
Test our new changes!
Today's experimental update introduces a substantial change to the way the game handles audio which we'd love to have players test. Currently this change is only relevant on PC. In the current experimental branch, audio is loaded and unloaded dynamically as you explore. This means the game startup time is much faster, and the game's overall memory usage is significantly lower, so it should be more stable overall and crash less often.
This also includes an experimental fix for the common slowdown and memory leak associated with completing research on Beasties. This issue does not happen consistently in our testing and has been hard to track down, but we might have fixed it with this build.
We'd love for players to try this version out and let us know whether you're seeing improved results. Our main concern would be whether there are any new audio bugs introduced (sounds missing, longer load times, or other issues).
Thanks for playing!!!!!!