It has been a few months since the last blog post and that’s a long time for our community to go with no updates! The reason for the long silence is that Axsom had transitioned to building level generation content. Between improving the workflow and creating new maps for the alpha, he simply could not find the time to write lengthy blog posts. With that being the case and communication with the community being so important, that's where I step in. Giant Enemy Crab asked me to fill the void, and I was more than happy to help out:

I’m th_pion. You can call me Pion or Tim for short. Some of you might know me already as an active community member since the blockdude era and a long-time alpha tester. From this time forward, I will be your new Community Manager!

Speaking of it, I’m not a huge fan of the term “Community Manager”. A community is not really something you have to manage. It’s something you have to nurture, so it stays healthy and can grow. Therefore, I like to think of my job as being more like a “Community Gardener”. The term is a bit cheesy but I certainly like it more than “Manager”.

So what will I be working on?

The main thing will be blog posts. There will obviously be announcements and patch notes. The more interesting thing I want to focus on, however, are interviews with different members of GEC to shed some light on design decisions and give you some insight into their work. I will also occasionally make a blog post about you! Highlighting the community's cool fan art or awesome gameplay clips.

I also plan on doing some live streams to give you folks the opportunity to interact with me directly. If you have additional ideas or want to talk about anything else, feel free to message me on Discord.

Network Refactor

That brings me to the hard part of my job with a bit of bad news I have to tell you:

We will shut down the alpha for the time being due to the network refactor merge. Our engineers have been diligently working since September on a refactor for the network layer of the game. This process is very important for us because it will enable us to address network-related issues, like lag, bad hit registration, and most importantly disconnects. We’re in the process of merging that refactor in and are choosing to divert 100% of our efforts to that merge. So the alpha is paused until the refactor is ready for alpha testing.

We will be back with the completed network refactor on the 28th of May, which is also when we’ll start handing out more alpha keys. So look forward to that, and we’ll see you on the other side.