Hey everyone,

First and foremost, I want to apologize for the delay and lack of communication. This past day has been hectic preparing for release. I know you all are extremely excited but I hope you can understand there was no malicious intent. I love this community dearly and I am extremely grateful for everyone who plays my game.

In Better News…

Secondly, I am ecstatic to announce the release of Level 3, Level Fun, and the Hub, along with 2 new entities and a plethora of new items. To get the update, all you need to do is select the Beta branch to start playing right now!

Why Beta?

Over this past day, I’ve come to realize BET has grown far past its small roots. The past couple of months have seen a 50x growth in player count. Bugs no longer impact a few people, but rather hundreds. There is a certain level of bug-free polish and game balancing that is needed for the game to hold well in Steam’s limelight.
These are definitely growing pains and not insurmountable but I haven't had time to scale BET for the level of polish that the player count reflects. Since June of this year, I’ve been working on the Journeys and Junctions update nonstop. With this update out now, I will have a lot more time to focus inward and build a sustainable base to meet expectations. I think BET has outgrown me a little bit recently but hopefully, I can reel things in with some team building.

How long will it be in Beta?

For the reasons mentioned above, it will probably stay in beta for a few days while we tweak the gameplay of the levels. Your feedback is crucial to this, we want to make the levels as fun as possible so please, voice what is good about the levels, and what sucks. Don’t hold back!
I know a beta is annoying, and a few months ago I would’ve just pushed this update live, but with all the people now enjoying BET, I want to get it right.

What happened?

This is a very fair question. 12 hour delays are unacceptable and for me to try to justify it would solidify my ignorance. The main root cause for those curious was my build machine throwing out errors, two hours before release, meaning I couldn't push to Steam. I had to drop everything and troubleshoot which put a huge wrench in the content roll out. This build machine packages updates almost hourly without fail, so its just unfortunate circumstance.
Regardless, this isn't an excuse, moving forward, I will be sure to have the update uploaded to Steam before I announce a time.

About the Discord

I’ve seen a lot of people upset about the discord being locked down, but it was the only option to avoid our server being banned by discord. 5,000 people joined in one day and by the end of the day, there were rampant slurs, nsfw content and people threatening other members in DMs. Discord has a standing policy that it is the server owner's duty to moderate and disallow those things, otherwise that server is shut down. I wasn't involved in the moderation process, but our mod team consists of a handful of my friends and no one wants to lose sleep over a discord modding role. Our server is usually a kind and friendly environment for backrooms enthusiasts so no one was prepared. After this message, there will be a slow unlocking of channels to ease back into things.

How can I improve?

Finally, some feedback for me. Addressing thousands of people is extremely difficult, along with managing getting the update out. I am well aware though of the situation being handled poorly but if I can ask for some feedback on how to better address the community, it would help me build a protocol to best serve you all. I’ll add a FAQ section to this post so we can have a semi-open discussion.