The Kickstarter reward details seem to imply a release date of June 2012, but I don't know anything about beta testing or the like.

Hi Guys,

It's a good question.

Our first aim here is to always bring as much playable code to our kickstarter backers as soon as possible. It's why we're devoting time right now to producing a version of our alpha code which can be released to you without our supervision. It'll only be representative of 40% of the full experience feature-wise (and we're crazy excited about the remaining 60% which involves the mapping and world creation elements) but we want you all to be playing with it.

Our goal for June 2012 is to release something as close to feature complete as possible within the time-frame, with a view to releasing it for our Kickstarter backers and beginning the process of honing, debugging and replacing those features until we have a completely awesome experience. At that point we'll open the gates to the rest of the world. We can't say how long that will take, we want to allow ourselves the space and time to make something incredible.

Feedback is, as always, totally welcome.
Simon Fox