New info fresh from the press people:
We've completely 'refurbished' the sandboxes that some of you may have played in the past. We've combined all the sandboxes into a single sandbox. Unfortunately, we are going to have to push back the release date for this new sandbox by a few days. I suspect it will be ready by Monday, but it could be ready sooner.
It will feature our brand new graphics and animation engine. The new engine has been greatly improved since our 'beta 1 video', and I think you guys will really like it. The graphics are better in line with what we've visualized as a final draft. We've removed the black borders and cleaned up the blurry art. Also, we've redone almost all of the animations for the characters and significantly reduced the memory footprint.
However, there will still be some significant performance issues when we launch the new sandbox. We will have these ironed out over the week. Next week we are also focusing on the multiplayer version of the sandbox that each of your beta accounts will have access to. This means you will be able to invite people to your personal sandbox and play around in a multiplayer setting. I have no exact date yet on this, but it could be as early as next week.
Live beta is trending towards the end of January. I can't guarantee that the servers will be up constantly, but im going to try my best. We're still severely under-funded and I don't have the means to hire additional artists or programmers right now, so it's very difficult for me to meet deadlines.
Thank you everyone for your patience! This is going to be an awesome game.