Hi everyone! We've got something really cool going on this weekend. We'll be hosting our first ever Sprint tournament this Saturday, August 12th! Sign up to race on Discord, and watch the fierce competition in action on Twitch!

• Where: http://twitch.tv/refractstudios
• When: 11am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST (time zone converter)
• Sign Up: https://discord.gg/0SlqqvzfIbgXSBub

One big reason why we haven't yet hosted a Sprint tournament is that we wanted to ensure it would be as fair as possible for all players. In that effort we've invited three talented level creators from our community to each create a brand new level. The levels will be officially unveiled on Saturday during each round of the tournament. In the meantime, here’s a teaser:
Learn more about prizes, event rules, and more on Discord. See you on Saturday!

DISTANCE AT GAMESCOM

In other exciting news, we'll be returning to Germany in less than two weeks to show Distance at gamescom! We're really excited to show off some of the latest levels in Adventure mode to our European friends, host a few tournaments at the booth, and some other fun stuff. Thanks to our friends at Indie Arena for having us again! You can find us in Hall 10.1 Booth A-020. If you’re attending, be sure to watch @refractstudios on Twitter for the latest info during the show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSpAqfuxqZY

LOOKING FOR GAMESCOM VOLUNTEERS

Since there are just a couple of us making the trek to Germany we're once again looking for volunteers to help at the booth (especially with events like tournaments). In exchange for volunteering at the booth we can get you special access to the expo and likely some other rewards. If this interests you please email ellie@refract.com with the subject line "Gamescom volunteer" and we'd love to discuss the details with you.

QUICK DEVELOPMENT UPDATE

The past couple months have largely been focused on wrapping up major content for the 1.0 release, including Adventure mode as well as some miscellaneous content for Arcade. Wrapping up a project of this scope has certainly been an immense challenge, but I can’t describe how exciting it is to see the pieces all come together. On the PS4 side of things, our next major step is to take any content that’s locked in and do our best to make any required optimizations. Not only do our latest Adventure levels push the CPU to its limit, we are noticing that memory has finally become a concern. We’ve been holding off on these final optimizations until we knew how far the PS4 would be stretched. On the upside the visual quality of our environments has never been higher. We just have to ensure that the PS4 (and lower spec machines in general) are able to fully enjoy them. Following gamescom we’re essentially moving into the final polish and optimization stage of development. We don’t have a perfect plan for what will be publicly released on PC before the 1.0 launch because our focus is 100% on finishing content for 1.0. There is (of course) an endless list of things we’d like to improve in the public build, but we must stay the course and get this 1.0 content locked in before moving on. Anyway, our plan is to keep pressing forward and do our best to bring this project to a proper 1.0. We hope to see many of you at gamescom later this month, and in the meantime we can’t wait to witness the tournament madness this weekend. - Jordan (@torcht)