This being May, you might reasonably assume that if you didn't hear back about the "February" Beta yet, you didn't get in. But that's small brain thinking. Not only has the February Beta (launched in March) not ended, multiple other betas are being juggled recklessly around.

What's going on, you ask? You will regret you asked. Because it takes slightly longer to explain than anyone's interest level in this topic really warrants.

500 people admitted, 2,500 more will be let in

Really, this is an ongoing beta that'll last until we think the game is ready. However, we admit people in batches, and we're doing that very slowly so far. The point of batching is to fix stuff, then get fresh eyes on the fixes. But we've had very little time to fix stuff reported by the first 500 people we let into this beta in March, so it hasn't made sense to let in the next batch yet.

If you wanna be in on a future batch, you need to be on our mailing list[www.suspiciousdevelopments.com] and check the appropriate box.

The Feb beta comes in two parts: you get the first 3 acts of the game right away, then if you give us feedback on those, we invite you in to the full beta featuring the final act.

Why have we been busy? Because of the...


For Reasons, we need a demo ready by a certain deadline, so we've been scrambling to make that and get it tested fast. If you played the Gunpoint demo way back in the day, you know we like to add something a little extra on the end, so it wasn't as simple as just truncating the game. We've done two rounds of testing here:

Demo 1 test
We let in 1,500 mailing list members who'd signed up to test the full game, and bribed them to test the demo first, by pledging to jump them straight into the full version of the February beta if they gave us feedback. Lots of them did!

Unfortunately, this feedback revealed that my wildly high-concept idea for the 'something extra' was confusing and frustrating a great many players, so we had to rethink.

Demo 2 test
For this, I re-opened our old Steam Playtest - that's the thing where you were able to sign up on our store page and get let in automatically, rather than having to redeem a Steam key. So around 3,000 people who played the game a few years ago suddenly got access to the demo beta, and a few of them even noticed and played it.

Now that we've checked it didn't completely break, and early feedback on the new 'something extra' is great, I've let in another 1,000 new folks who signed up for that long ago, so we'll see where that gets us. If it all goes well, there won't be any further demo testing.

We won't be using Steam Playtest for anything else - we're not ready to give the full game to 4,000 people, and you can't remove testers you let in via the public Playtest signup system, so it's sort of a dead end for us now.


If you're on our mailing list[www.suspiciousdevelopments.com] and opted in to the beta, you're still in the running to be included in a future batch of the Feb Beta - no action needed. It might be a while before we get to you, though, since the demo 1 testers who gave us feedback will form the next batch of folks we let in.

If you don't get in, the above mentioned Reasons mean it shouldn't be too long before you get to play a chunk of the game anyhow, and maybe a little something extra.