Hey! I'm pretty new to this site, although I made an account a while ago for whatever reason, but I've been looking into the rules a little and I'm thinking about submitting a small game that does need a little context.

Over on a private discord server, we have a sort-of improv video series that is based on a book series called Warriors, where our voice lines are animated by the owner of the server. There's about 100 people in the server that are involved with the series, as well as the ~50k viewers of the videos. One of the members is developing a game for our community for fun and has been making some decently frequent updates, however it's currently only playable for the server members in an itch.io page (I think it's called an open beta?). Some of the members have tried to speedrun the game recently, and that's where this idea was kicked off.

I'm hoping that once the development is done and v1.0 is released, the game will get some traction from the channel's viewers. Regardless, I'd like to know if a community-built game like this would be allowed if it got enough traction, and when I should start going through the process of submitting it. I would preferably like to try and have a page up as early as I can because I love tracking anything to do with leaderboard history, and plus, the leaderboard could be coupled with the announcement so people actually KNOW there's a speedrunning community behind it.

I'm writing this under the impression that a game has to be fully released to be submitted, but I haven't actually seen that in the rules unless I overlooked it somewhere. If that's true though, I won't have to worry about this for a few months since, again, the game is a WIP, but my spreadsheet for it is really clunky and I'd just like to know if this would be possible before I go further. Thanks!

TL;DR (3 main questions) - Can a game from a tight-knit community be submitted if an outside audience is substantial, when would be a good time to submit a currently developing game for review, and can open betas be submitted?