Road to Beta, Chapter X: Hey! Beta is Actually Starting!

About a year ago we started our very first alpha tests of Glitch. We knew it was going to be a long round of testing (though maybe not this long) and it turned out we were right. Hundreds of features have been added —and nearly as many trimmed or re-thought— thousands of pictures drawn and animations made, hundreds of thousands of lines of code written, all of it powered by support, feedback, patience, (and impatience!) from our testing community. Thank you all, so much, for being an integral part of our journey.

Today, we’re thrilled (and relieved and exhausted and delirious) to announce that we’re starting beta next week. If you already have access to our alpha tests, you’ll notice much more frequent testing (along, of course, with more new features, content and increased polish). If you don’t already have access to the tests, you’ll notice that you’ll be much more likely to get an invite: though there are still tens of thousands of people in the queue, we’ll be inviting many more and switching to a system where existing testers can invite their friends.

On top of that, we also closed a new round of financing last week. Andreessen Horowitz and Accel —both of whom have been with us since the very beginning— have invested an additional $10.7M into Tiny Speck. We are truly grateful for their support, their belief in us, and everything they’ve already done to help. Start-ups: if you are looking for financing, both partnerships are seriously fantastic to work with.

This new investment allows us to move even faster in creating a game-world like no other, to continue building the powerful tech infrastructure underneath it all, and to build out the services to support our ever growing player base.  While we are proud of what we’ve done so far, the list of the many wonderful things still to build is long. And of course we’re hiring. Independent mobile game developers: get in touch … we have something we want to talk about.

In short, things are going swimmingly, and we’re excited to be taking the next step toward public release. Being in beta will in no way mean an end to new feature development — even the end of beta when Glitch hits its 1.0 release, it’ll still just be 1.0 — we’ve got a backlog a mile long we’ll be choosing from judiciously, and there are many things coming down the way! Testers, again, thanks for all your support!

Other recent blog posts

• Glitch HQ — Revamped interface, mail, imagination, and more
• Progress Report: April Releases
• Bigger, Better, Brighter
• Progress Report
• Glitch HQ updated — and now on Android!
• Progress Report: March Testing Release
• The Big Unlaunching
• Our One Month Anniversary
• Zombies and Shakespeare: Happy Zilloween!
• Why it's taking you so long to get an invite