Two exciting things yet again! First of all, the beta has started. The beta is absolutely free (though tips are appreciated if you want to give them), and we are taking people in groups. Right now our first group has gone in, but we still do have room in later groups if you are interested.

Last time I showed a brief video of gameplay, plus a written rundown of it. That also had an embed of the first part of the Tales of Woe series of visual shorts from us.

Part two is now here!

“Tales of Woe” is a three-part series of humorous video shorts set in the Stars Beyond Reach universe. The first video focuses on the approach to the planet, and reveals the general backstory. The second video is a look at a supremely unlucky set of new arrivals on the planet. And the third video is a look at that civilization as it has become ascendant… but at what price?

Animated by Julian GD, and voiced by Toby Ricketts and Bronnie Howells.

Beta Bits And Reminders

The game is already at a point where it is feature complete, and has been for a bit. The last few weeks I’ve been going through and wrecking stuff and figuring out balance and so on, but the game is huge and there’s a lot of that sort of thing to do. We’re going to be doing a closed beta, which is basically saying that it’s invite-only. That said, we don’t have a specific cap on the number of people that we’ll let in, so if you want to be added to the list of future beta players, please feel free to post on the forums here or on another related thread.

We’ve got essentially three groups of beta players:

1. Redshirts. These folks are being thrown into the game right at the start (now), when documentation is the most-poor and so is the balance. These guys jump on the early confusion-grenades so that later waves of beta testers don’t get hit by that particular brand of shrapnel. ;)

2. Blueshirts. These folks will come in probably about a week from now. The worst things will have been taken care of, and the blueshirts can clamber over the dead bodies of the redshirts to have a better first experience. But it’s still a lot of live fire going on down there, if you know what I mean.

3. Everybody else. I’ll be bringing in people in in batches every week or half week or so. I want to space this out some, because we only get your first impression once, and as we polish the balance and documentation that is something I’d like to see the results of (is that clearer or not? etc.).

Help Us With Procedural Market Item Names! (If You Want)

If you want to help us with the components for procedural market item names, that would be awesome. It’s a big task, but if a lot of us do just a bit on there, we’ll have two big nice things. Firstly, nobody goes brain-dead from trying to fill out the whole thing. And secondly, we get a wider variety of creativity from a larger group.

Target Release Date: June 5th

It’s been a long haul on this project, and we’re really excited to be able to share increasingly more with you over the coming months. I’m super proud of this one.

Until next time!

Click here to view the official forum post for this topic.

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