The all new IBT Survival Island has been released to the first group of lucky testers.

If you didn't get a PM you didn't miss out - After some discussions with Roach we have decided to just pick a few local Aussie testers for this round. We needed to go with people I can chat with face-to-face (benefit of attending the monthly Steem meetups in Adelaide) and a couple of people I've known and interacted with for a long time and I know specifics about their machines etc. This should get us some very early yet critical feedback and give us one last chance to get the obvious bugs squashed before distributing to the wider community for crucial testing of this part of the game.

The above image was captured from the game, but has been modified to work for this Steem Post.

Those who join our community and participate in testing will be able to reserve additional tokens, amount and when will be discussed in our community channel, all are welcome and membership is free - here is the invite link: https://discord.gg/Gr3kH9T

The above image was captured from the test release game, but has been modified to work for this Steem Post.

The images in this post have had the graphics turned down in order to make reasonable workable gifs. The menu system seems to be working great and the background is dynamically updated with in game footage to keep players entertained while changing settings etc.

The above image was captured from the test release game, but has been modified to work for this Steem Post.

Feedback is coming in as I type this post, and so far its been great - so please stay tuned as we will be opening to a wider test audience very soon.

What else is new:

I have sent an email to Steem inc. and Co about participating in the test SMT process but sadly, but not surprisingly have had no response - There are so many Steem developments going on, I'm sure they have better offers at this stage. Regardless, I have to work with Roach to nail Public API calls from within UE4 (some previous research pointed me to C++ module, but I need to make sure any such add-on doesn't present security issues to our players as well). I don't expect this to be a big issue as we have some contacts, and I can wait until the official SMT is release, but I need to fully explore our options in terms of integrating deeply with the game or not.

Anyways, that's it for this update - this test release is a significant milestone and will be the first time many testers will be getting a view of the game; I look forward to providing a fresh update with wider distribution news soon. Until then I hope everyone has a fun and safe new years and Steem on!.