IT’S BEEN A JOURNEY :)

It’s already been more than a year since Private Beta started, and wow, a lot has happened since June 2019! 2020 has been an unusual year, to say the least. With the Covid-19 lockdown beginning in March, our whole team started working from home, and now, all 23 of us are working remotely on Skyweaver!

Despite these challenging and extraordinary times, there are many things to celebrate. First, we’ve invited over 60,000 players into our Private Beta in the last 12 months, and interest to get in has been immense! With more than 170,000 people currently on the waitlist to get Private Beta access, we’re humbled to see so much excitement for the game.

If you have been with us for some time, you can certainly understand just how improved the game looks and feels right now. We’ve settled on a bi-weekly patch routine (after almost a year with weekly patches) that allows us to enhance and monitor the game with the help of our community, and a number of features and quality of life changes have emerged from this relationship. We’ve successfully delivered 30 patches in 2020 alone!

Some major features stand out. Our new Secret-State Game Engine, which makes the game faster, safer and more reliable; our Twitch Extension; the 500 Beta Card selection (100 per Prism until Open Beta); the caching system; upgrades in latency and netcode; the start of our particle effects; graphics updates; new animations and the complete overhaul of our lighting system; and much more.

Having said that, 2020’s craziness also forced us to rethink some elements that needed some tweaks to really shine and reach the quality we were always aiming for, the biggest one being our Economy. Skyweaver is not pulling any punches in its approach to ownership, accessibility and transparency! But fluctuating gas costs during the year made us realize we needed to make some changes to our previous plans.

We are building a brand new way for game economies to work, and because this is a new concept in the way we’ve designed it, a number (a BIG number) of legal and technical ramifications need to be considered. We have a small team of experts who have been working day and night tackling these for the better part of the year. Our goal is to ensure we have all our bases covered to deliver the best possible Skyweaver game experience for our players. This is the reason it’s taking us a little longer than initially expected to launch our Soft Launch, and eventually, Open Beta. But we assure you that it will all be worth the wait :)

On the community side, we couldn’t be happier. Throughout Private Beta, we continue to have countless loyal players who have stuck with us through the gestation of the game. People like Werfs, MissaurusRex, Joss Stardad, Freud, JustAddBacon, AlphaSapphireX, Professor Icicle, Good Dog, KOYggs, lucafulano and many many others (including our Moderation team on Discord) keep the game alive, entertaining and fun, while we work under the hood. A sincere “gg” to all those unsung Skyweavers!

So, what’s ahead of us? As shared in our State of the Game back in August, we’re working our way to our Final Testing Period where we’ll release an early version of Conquest and the test version of the new Sequence Wallet that will ultimately allow players to experience a rewarding player-owned economy in the new dimension of gaming! We’re super stoked about that and we’ll share all the juicy details in the not-too-distant future. After the Final Testing Period, we’ll enter Soft Launch at which time our Economy becomes live and real! You will be able to play our Conquest game mode, win awesome tradable rewards, use your Sequence Wallet, and provide feedback on our Leaderboard system. During Soft Launch, we’ll invite everyone from our waitlist into the game, and if everything is working as it should, then we’ll move into Open Beta.

Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve accomplished together since Horizon was founded in 2018: (tap or click the image to enlarge)

So, here we are, with an update message to keep us honest, and you informed. We hope you all have a great holiday season and a wonderful start to 2021. Be safe, stay healthy, play as many matches as you can (still time for the Season Zero Gold Card!), eat decadent food, and take care of yourself. We will keep you entertained, competitive and skybound in this new year!

Love,

The Horizon Team