Morning everyone!
As of this weekend, the fourth round of external playtesting is now LIVE. If you are within that pool, remember to check your emails for the next round's instructions. There's been a lot of progress since the last playtest, and we want to thank you again for committing your time and feedback to help us polish the game during this time.
For this coming week, we were originally planning on releasing the Backer Alpha by this Wednesday but have pushed it back to next week. We're still running into a couple of issues that we're close to nailing down, and just want to have that extra buffer time to make sure the Beta build works well. (Also gives us more time to dedicate to Mac and Linux support. We haven't forgotten about you guys!)
There's a lot of milestone deliveries we have to hit that I can't touch upon, but overall, it's a lot of clean up in the levels and general bug fixing. I'd love to tweak the physics of running into tables right now so things don't fly everywhere, but performance and optimization issues are taking up our attention first and foremost. Streamlining the levels as well as making sure the story and characters are accurately represented during quests has also been important.
Marcaul's design as well as Pluto's Gate has gotten quite a number of overhauls since the Backer Alpha, and we appreciate all of the feedback we've had from backers and playtesters alike about this. Keep an eye out for secrets and hidden areas... it's very easy to miss some treasures that are worth keeping.
I don't want to spoil too much, since the Backer Beta will be out next week... so here's a sneak peek at the new entrance to Pluto's Gate. Good luck!