Happy Friday, Larryettes on this side of the International Dateline.

Those of you who read all the way to the bottom of my last update may’ve read this line: “If all goes according to plan, you can expect the beta next week (week of May 6th)!”

Well, we’re pretty much at the end of the week of May 6th, and those of you who pledged at the Alpha/Beta level (and above) haven’t received your beta invitation yet. (For those of you who are still wondering why you didn’t get an Alpha version: when we Kickstarted, access to the Alpha/Beta versions of the game came only with a pledge of $75 or more.)

We’re now shooting for Monday, May 13th, to release the beta. We’ve had some interesting hiccups in the past couple of weeks…one of which was breaking Unity. (It seems that no Unity game has ever had more than about 3,000 lines of speech before, and we have about three times as many.) We also wanted to get *all* the final speech into the game before sending out the beta, and the last of the “pickups” was only recorded today.

We’ll announce it here when the beta goes out. It will include French, Italian, German, and Spanish (“FIGS”), and we’re hoping for a Mac version as well for testing.

If you’re one of our Beta testers, when you receive your email invitation, please be sure to read the materials very carefully. We will be looking strictly for *bugs* at this point, as opposed to suggestions for enhancements. (We’ve fielded and taken into consideration thousands of enhancement suggestions over the course of the project, especially after releasing the Alpha, but now it’s time to concentrate on finding and squashing bona fide bugs.) The instructions we send will tell you how to download the beta, where to report the bugs, and what format to follow in your bug reports. We’ll also be sure to tell you what bugs we already know about, so that you don’t waste time writing up a beautifully-crafted report for a bug we’ve already identified.

So cross your fingers for a Monday release. We’re shooting hard for a May 31 ship date, so that should give us almost three weeks. We’re anticipating that’ll be doable, because the beta you’ll receive is going to be pretty darn clean.

In other news: our Box Art contest on the Replay forums ended this past Wednesday, and we’re still debating the winner. Those of us who have hair (that disqualifies Al and me) are tearing it out trying to pick the best. We’ll have a decision for you next week.

And in the meantime, just in case you haven’t seen her yet, here’s Larry’s new love interest, Jasmine, exactly as she’ll be seen in the game!

Talk to you next week!

Josh