Greetings my Attuned Mortals,

The team has been heads down working on the project since Kickstarter. It is great to be able to turn my focus back towards development and getting Shards Online to Alpha. The focus of the development team is on two areas right now; making progress on the first map and getting our server in the hands of our Early Admins. In addition, we have been planning some really fun events for our Pre-alpha Playtesters to keep the feedback rolling in.

Celador, our first alpha map, is really starting take shape. In addition to the quarry and village area shown during Kickstarter, we are building out the Black Forest, Lower Plains, and Lake Tethys. These are the primary areas of the map where players will be building houses. We expect to get these areas into the hands of our playtesters sometime in March.

We are also working on polishing up the blueprints for the initial set of player houses we plan to provide in Alpha. We are already up to 10 different house blueprints and I myself cannot wait to get my first house built in Celador.

Houses2

We also have lots of things in the pipe! The resource gathering, house placement and cooking systems are past initial design and are ready to begin development. We are also fleshing out the content and stories for the residents of Eldeir Village and the denizens of the graveyard.

Finally, on the player run server front, I have been personally working to optimize the Lua script engine to make sure we have the ability to support enough servers for all of our Pre-alpha Admins. We also have the server admin web interface in early stages of development. The next major tasks would be script cleanup and documentation and the Modder’s handbook.

There is so much exciting stuff going on here at Citadel Studios and we are absolutely dying get everyone’s hands into it so we can get your feedback. We have a plan to run regular weekly playtest events starting in February. We will be updating the build around twice a month to keep the playtests feeling fresh.

We are also scheduling another playtest event for January 31st. We’ve made some improvements to the PvP shrines game that we want to get into your hands. It’s going to be a blast. If you aren’t into PvP, don’t worry! We have a couple other events coming up in February that are PvE and crafting focused.

Last but not least, I’m working with Melaedha to get a whole bunch of community roundtable events scheduled (atleast 1 a month) to keep you guys as close to the development process as possible. The first one is planned for February 7th. This event along with all future roundtables and playtest events will be posted in the events page, so keep an eye out there for details.

Don’t forget, if you haven’t pledged your support yet, it’s not too late! Head over to our pledge page right now and secure your early access to Shards Online. This project will be successful because of your support.

Sincerely,
Derek Brinkmann
Project Lead