Good friends,These are exciting days. The road to Alpha is speeding by, largely because of you. Thank you for playing so many games since we dropped the NDA one short week ago!
We now have strong confidence in our game servers, and with your help we’ve already rev’d the Twitch integration with the Shardfall System.This is why we love community development. We can go so fast together.
Shardbound has been in development for more than two years, and as CEO Dave Cerra reveals in the kickstarter video, the last six months have been used for targeting the core gameplay and testing. A Kickstarter Reward card back, for those who backed the kickstarter and earned this reward The OG card back from the past life in Alpha, unlocked to anyone who played a game with it prior to this patch A brand new default card back emblazoned with the Shardbound logo.
So let’s talk about what’s next.Early Access on Steam!It’s your favorite platform, and it’s ours as well. We’re leaping into Early Access as soon as we hit full Alpha. What’s that gonna take?Alpha = Core features are all in the gameAt Spiritwalk, Alpha means that we can all use the software generally as intended. We’ll still be actively iterating on systems, and some small ones are missing, but the big things are in. There will be bugs. The software won’t be optimized. Things will lack polish.
But on the whole, we can all “play the whole game.”We are very close, with the last core features coming soon, most notably Progression. Once we’ve dialed that in with your help - and prepared for full account migration to Steam - we’ll be ready to flip the switch, call it Alpha, and put Shardbound into Early Access.We need your help Kickstart our Early Access on February 16!To raise visibility and to get the game into Early Access, we’re launching a Kickstarter. Many of you have asked to help and have generously offered monetary support. Now is your chance!We really need YOU to open your hearts and dig into both your wallets and your friend lists to help us Kickstart Shardbound into Early Access. This is coming next Thursday, February 16th. We need you there, contributing on Day 1. Please plan to drive us forward however you can.
We’ll make sure there’s a way for everyone to contribute, and options will deliver discounts on things we know you’ll want anyhow.Once the Kickstarter launches, please share it with everyone you can while it's running. Let all of gamerdom know that Shardbound rocks and deserves their support. If you believe in us, tell your friends.
If you stream and believe in us, tell your viewers. Organize and work together to create a real network effect. Respectfully take the game into like-minded subreddits, your social media, your board game group anywhere you genuinely think there are gamers like us who will love Shardbound.Kickstarters live and die by their initial momentum, and we have no doubt that you will shift us all into high gear on Day 1. Your passion as a community is inspiring to us.February 16. Let’s do this!And the Kickstarter tiers will confirm this game will be Free to PlayYes, you all knew it. Like our last game, Shardbound has been designed as a free to play game.
As always, our studio’s development philosophy around this (and any) business model is to strike a fair and generous balance between player and developer. We just wanted to confirm this here before you guys saw the tiers on the Kickstarter. We will always come to the community first.Whether you play Shardbound, stream Shardbound, or both, we hope this gives everyone a very clear understanding of what we’re working on, what our goals are, and how you can help.Two weeks ago, we went 24/7 last week, we dropped the NDA next week, Kickstarter and as soon as we can after that, Early Access on Steam.Wheels up, Rangers! Help us claim the sky!Your friends at Spiritwalk Games.
I'm excited for you guys putting it in Steam!It's such a good way of advertising your game out to people. From my experience, indie games that didn't integrate with Steam had a lot less exposure than it would have otherwise.I also had many friends ask if this game was on Steam when I tried to get them to play with me. The ease of download and access straight from Steam is really good.Best part, I can put your wallpapers and emoticons on my profile to show off! And brag about my thousands of hours in this game.
Now you can share!Help your backers reach your daily goals and help others see how you're doing. It's easy, with Kicktraq Mini.Here are a few quick snippits of code you can use to embed your personalized widget on your website, in your blog, and even on your favorite forum.HTML for websites & blogs BBCode for forums url=code for. Well, Reddit View the latest stats for Shardbound on Kicktraq(Note: Kickstarter recently disabled remote embedding for images on project pages, so embedding code doesn't work on project pages (yet) - just everywhere else.You can.