Hi All! The team and I are back with another update, brining a brand new way of navigating levels to BET. Players can now freely go from Level 0 to -1 and then choose to go back to Level 0 (0.11). The same goes for Level 1. We want branching paths to add to the gameplay and feel that allowing backtracking makes the world feel much larger- less a series of levels and more a journey where you decide what you want to explore. This update also includes a lot of tweaks and improvements to Level -1. We've been collecting a ton of feedback related to the level, so with these changes it should feel much more fun and fair.

• Added Ability to Traverse Back to Level 0 from Levels -1 and 1,

• Updated Level 0 Sub Level to Support Back Tracking,

• Added Work Lights to Level -1 Exit Hallway,

• Small Environmental Tweaks for Level 0,

• Replaced References to "the Entity" in Level 0 Objectives with "An Entity". This Reduces Confusion for New Players and Allows You to Record the Smiler or Bacteria for All Entity Related Objectives.

• Overhauled Tutorial Area for an Even Distribution of Rooms, Consistent Size Across All Player Counts, and Hid Objective Until The TV is Interacted with to Reduce Confusion,

• Reduced Map Size By 8% In its Smallest Generation (1 Player) Scaling Linearly for All Player Counts, Topping Out at a 30% Reduction for 6 Players,

• Removed "Employees Only Sign" From Closets to Increase Anticipation When Opening Doors,

• Increased Number of Closets by 30%,

• Entity Will Now Spawn Within 10-40 Seconds of Loading into the Level, Down from 120-150 Seconds,

• Updated Entity Form and Animations to be More Humanoid,

• Improved Jumpscare Animation and Sound,

• Increased Entity Speed When Chasing,

• Reduced Radius Of Light that Destroys the Entity from 500,

• Completing the Ritual Now Teleports You to a New, Smaller Area Connected to the Ending Room, Reducing Frustration When Trying to Find the Exit After Completing the Objective,

• Players Now Spawn in the TV Room to Reduce Chance of Missing the Graffiti Hint Before Encountering the Entity,

• Updated Graffiti Hint for Better Clarity on Combating the Entity

• Removed "It's Cold" Objective Description to Avoid Confusion,

• Improved Smoothness of Teleports,

• Fixed Being Able to Interact with Light Switches Through Closet Walls in -1,

• Fixed Entity Sometimes Screaming Indefinitely in -1,

• Fixed TV Sometimes Not Teleporting Players into the Next Area in -1,

• Numerous Other Small Bug Fixes for -1,

• Fixed Bugs with Non-Hosts When the Lights Flash Red After Tutorial Completion,

• Fixed "Look Deeper" Text Not Being Translated,

• Fixed Chance for a Hallway to Clip Through the Ending Room,

• Fixed Grayscale Effect Sometimes not Applying to Players,

• Fixed Opinion Collector Sometimes Spawning Incorrectly on Clients,

• Fixed Lights Being Flickered by the Entity Even if that Hallway Was Unpowered,

• Reduced CPU Usage by 40% on the Game Thread Caused by Inefficient Door Code in Level -1,

• Optimized GPU Performance When Looking at Doorways on Ultra Settings,

• Fixed Crash on Startup or During Gameplay Caused by Raytracing for Users with AMD GPUs 7000 and 9000 Series, with Adrenalin Driver 25 or Newer. (NOTE: The fix was disabling Enhanced Raytracing for users with this GPU + driver combination. If you wish to enable hardware raytracing without crashing, downgrade your AMD driver to 24.12.1. This is an AMD + Unreal Engine bug and will be fixed by them in the future),

• Fixed Chance for Game to Crash When Connecting to BET Servers,

• Fixed Rare Crash Caused by Voice Chat When Joining New Lobbies,

• Fixed Crash When Leaving a Lobby While the World is Still Generating,

• Fixed Crash Caused by Generating A New Level While Experiencing Extreme Network Instability,

• Fixed Rare Crash When Transitioning from Level 4 to 6,

• Fixed Crash When Trying to Run BET as a Dedicated Server When Using Local Split Screen Applications (Local Split Screen apps are not officially supported, but I saw a few reports and wanted to fix it.),

• Fixed Bug Causing "What's New" to Always Display When Entering the Menu,

• Fixed Opinion Collector Sometimes Spawning inside Walls

I am super excited to announce a brand new level has come to B.E.T, Level -1: "The Grayscale Halls". Level -1 is "An expansive, winding system of concrete hallways. This hotel is characterized by its disorienting grayscale color and its rotting wallpaper."

I can hear many of you shouting at your computer screens... ːsteamhappyː. As of last month, most of the team is back to levels. Ethan has been hard at work cooking this up. To give a rough timeline of this year January-March was 2 new levels released and April-September was scaling the team, overhauling the game (v0.12), fixing bugs, and just polishing things we thought were impacting the experience. It's a lot of work but needed so the game doesn't feel sloppy. In that time, we also ported the game for consoles! (Official announcement coming soon)

The team is super proud with the progress made on -1 in one month and it lays the ground work for delivering content at a faster pace to you all. We are now able to get medium to small levels completed in under a month while also potentially completing larger ones (Like 9, 232, 94, 33, etc) every couple months. The team is still scaling and our rate of getting content out will only be improving! In the mean time we will be chipping away at our roadmap[portal.productboard.com]!

As always, thank you to everyone who plays BET. It's crazy to think it's been 3 whole years since we released. Since the first day of release, my mission has been to treat every copy sold as an investment into the game's future. I started BET because I saw too many great indie games die off and waste their potential. I am so grateful for everyone's continued support and will guarantee it goes right back into making BET an even better experience. <3