Hey everyone, long time no see!
Let's jump directly into this announcement by addressing the first question. Life has been quite hectic for both of us, and that led to a lot less time we could spend on Starveil. While things are probably still going to be quite in the flux, we're really itching to get back to working on Starveil and get it out of the door, and we're figuring out the path forward. Development might be a bit slower coming forward, but hopefully not at a standstill like in the past few months.
That brings us to the other half of the title. Starveil is not going anywhere yet, and we're looking at what needs to be done to release as early access and what the current pain points are. We found one really major pain point and that is our server host, it's cheap, it's good, but it's just simply not good enough to host a game server, and some of you have probably noticed a lot of various lag related issues.
So while we figure that out, we have disabled the Playtest and are going to develop more locally, since a more powerful server really isn't in our budget right now. We will still run some very small scale tests but since it's means running the server on a home network, we're simply not comfortable opening it to the larger public.
But worry not, once we've figured out a good solution that would actually make the game playable for everyone, that doesn't involve hosting a server at home, the larger scale playtests will be back. And we might even invite some people for smaller tests just to make sure the gameplay still works.
Thanks for the support you guys gave us in the past playtests, we still believe the game is really fun to play, even after stepping back for a few months, and we can't wait to have you guys back playing it again :)