Shardbound News

Greetings, Rangers -

It has been a long and difficult road since our last post, and we appreciate your continued patience and support. We’re reaching out today to give an update, and it’s likely not the one you were hoping for.

We’ve been unable to find the support we need to bring Shardbound to a full commercial launch. As such, we’re now at a point where we need to officially cease active development of the game and find new opportunities to support ourselves and our families.

What does this mean for the live service of Shardbound?

In the immediate term, the game will continue to be available and the servers will stay online.

However, for the longer term, we’re hoping to hear from you. We want to figure out our next steps together. While we won’t be able to devote our days to Shardbound anymore, we want to support this amazing community in whatever ways we can.

As always, please join us for discussion on our discord channel:
https://discord.gg/shardbound

- Your Friends at Spiritwalk Games

Greetings, Rangers -

It has been a long and difficult road since our last post, and we appreciate your continued patience and support. We’re reaching out today to give an update, and it’s likely not the one you were hoping for.

We’ve been unable to find the support we need to bring Shardbound to a full commercial launch. As such, we’re now at a point where we need to officially cease active development of the game and find new opportunities to support ourselves and our families.

What does this mean for the live service of Shardbound?

In the immediate term, the game will continue to be available and the servers will stay online.

However, for the longer term, we’re hoping to hear from you. We want to figure out our next steps together. While we won’t be able to devote our days to Shardbound anymore, we want to support this amazing community in whatever ways we can.

As always, please join us for discussion on our discord channel:
https://discord.gg/shardbound

- Your Friends at Spiritwalk Games

• Camera positioning for Lost Highlands has been adjusted to avoid ability buttons being hidden behind the player’s hand.
  
• Fixed some lighting that was applying inappropriately in Broken Mesa. The net result is that the lighting should feel less blown out.
  

• The Duel Menu has been reskinned with the updated UI style.
  
• The Bot Game Menu has been reskinned with the updated UI style.
  

• Fixed an issue where 3rd party auth tokens were given a 7 day expiration instead of the intended 30.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could quit the tutorial early by pressing the escape key at certain parts of the UI.
  

• Camera positioning for Lost Highlands has been adjusted to avoid ability buttons being hidden behind the player’s hand.
  
• Fixed some lighting that was applying inappropriately in Broken Mesa. The net result is that the lighting should feel less blown out.
  

• The Duel Menu has been reskinned with the updated UI style.
  
• The Bot Game Menu has been reskinned with the updated UI style.
  

• Fixed an issue where 3rd party auth tokens were given a 7 day expiration instead of the intended 30.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could quit the tutorial early by pressing the escape key at certain parts of the UI.
  

Hey there, Rangers.

We’ve got a rather tough Dev Update to share with all of you today. The development of Shardbound has encountered a roadblock, and we’re trying to look for ways to solve it.

A bit of background: when we started making Shardbound in Lauren’s garage, we set out to make a AAA-Quality competitive experience. We knew it would be a challenging road, and outside funding would be absolutely necessary to complete the game.

We raised the seed funding we needed to get started, which carried us to the pre-alpha version that we could test with you, our awesome community. When we needed to get a little bit further to soft-launch on Steam, we ran a successful Kickstarter with your incredible support.

The last leg of our journey to launch requires us to secure a financing round to polish gameplay, finish the art, and give Shardbound a full commercial launch.

And now, we’ve hit that frustrating roadblock. We were in the final stages of securing the necessary funding to finish Shardbound, and days before our expected closing, the deal fell apart.

During our two and a half year journey, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Starting up a studio is hard. Making games is hard. We’re picking up the pieces and looking at our options.

The only things we’re certain of right now is that the flourishing art pipeline must come to an immediate halt, and that our patch cadence may be disrupted. We’re evaluating everything - on the other side of this roadblock, the vision of Shardbound may remain the same, or it may change. This may happen quickly, or it may take a while.

Rest assured, we’re going to do everything we can to find our way forward with you.

Our highest priority right now is keeping Spiritwalk together, and we hope you’ll understand if we stumble while we’re getting our footing. While it’s tough to deliver this news while we’re unsure of our next steps, we felt the need to share it -- we’re all on this journey together.

As our road becomes clearer, you’ll be the first to know.

Thanks,
Your Friends at Spiritwalk