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Majora

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  1. Ultralord liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    In addition to the community update, I'd also like to take this time to share some of my personal thoughts as we transition into year 4 of Skylords Reborn. 

    3 years and 43 Community Updates in the books! Working on this yearly recap sure was a trip down memory lane with many "Did we really release that this year?". With so many moving parts and various things in development, things can start to blur a bit. Due to the nature of map making, this felt like a year in which we did a ton of work behind the scenes, but couldn't show off our hard work yet. I'm excited we can now finally start to reveal what the team has been working on.
    I hope our monthly community updates still managed to show we are hard at work, and had enough to reveal for players to feel engaged with the project. In hindsight, there were some things that we probably announced too early, (for example the Lost Soul Rework) but with so many variables in our project (our team now has 50 volunteers!) that is bound to happen now and then. I am extremely proud of the work our team put out this year, and I can't wait for players to get their hands on our new campaign maps. 
    Speaking of the team, we had a bunch of lovely people joining as volunteers! I am super grateful that 3 years in, we still have so many people with dedication and love for the project that they are willing to spend their free time on it. The following Skylords joined in 2023:
    CrazyCockerell and Titan as Tech-artists
    Piskr as Client Developer
    Pierakor as Tool Developer
    Lucas Ansei as Web Developer
    Ultralord as Video Editor
    Volin as Map Tester Coordinator
    Damo and Hrdina Impéria as Map Designers
    Kayrie as Map Artist. 
    Discoheart and Noah.K as Audio Editor 
    Vultagx and Linkz as Global Moderator
    ElementG is currently in his trial period for Tech-artist

    But it would be unfair to not also give a shout-out to the members who left the team during 2023: 
    Katchau (developer) left the team
    Nukie left the event department
    Watermelon Lord, Nukie, Pfirsichkralle and Dallarian left the Moderator department

    Thank you all for your work for the project!
    Besides the team, I would like to give a personal shout out to Kapo and Dreamlord. You know Kapo from his CCC and Masters of the Forge series, but he does not get nearly enough credit for how much he does for the project and has always been a reliable friend, whether it be proofreading my documents, or getting a Rayman statue imported from another country. Dreamlord has been our favorite Banzaiii Lorrrd and I have been consistently impressed by not only his quality voice acting but his professionalism and willingness to help out, sometimes on short notice. Besides doing voice-overs for our trailers, you can also expect to hear him in our loading screen narrations for the new maps in 2024. I have high hopes for his voice-acting career, and I hope 2024 will be the breakthrough year for him! 
    2023 was a year full of highs and lows. My girlfriend and I got our own apartment and a lovely cat named Lyra. At the same time I saw friends struggling with depression, break-ups, war and death of loved ones. The world can be a rough place, so please take care of yourself and each other. 
    What was your highlight for 2023? And what are you most excited about for 2024? Would love to hear it in the comments!
    Thank you so much for being a part of this lovely community. 
  2. Zeroo liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  3. Majora liked a post in a topic by Bleicher6 in Community Update - January 2024   
    Thank you all for keeping this alive and also updating it regulary. cant wait for the new campaign maps, that what i mosted whised for. 
  4. Hrdina_Imperia liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Understandable, let me right that wrong:





     
  5. Majora liked a post in a topic by LichterLoh in Community Update - January 2024   
    Units for the Amii look epic!
     
    Thanks for your lovely work and time
  6. Volin liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Understandable, let me right that wrong:





     
  7. Dallarian liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    In addition to the community update, I'd also like to take this time to share some of my personal thoughts as we transition into year 4 of Skylords Reborn. 

    3 years and 43 Community Updates in the books! Working on this yearly recap sure was a trip down memory lane with many "Did we really release that this year?". With so many moving parts and various things in development, things can start to blur a bit. Due to the nature of map making, this felt like a year in which we did a ton of work behind the scenes, but couldn't show off our hard work yet. I'm excited we can now finally start to reveal what the team has been working on.
    I hope our monthly community updates still managed to show we are hard at work, and had enough to reveal for players to feel engaged with the project. In hindsight, there were some things that we probably announced too early, (for example the Lost Soul Rework) but with so many variables in our project (our team now has 50 volunteers!) that is bound to happen now and then. I am extremely proud of the work our team put out this year, and I can't wait for players to get their hands on our new campaign maps. 
    Speaking of the team, we had a bunch of lovely people joining as volunteers! I am super grateful that 3 years in, we still have so many people with dedication and love for the project that they are willing to spend their free time on it. The following Skylords joined in 2023:
    CrazyCockerell and Titan as Tech-artists
    Piskr as Client Developer
    Pierakor as Tool Developer
    Lucas Ansei as Web Developer
    Ultralord as Video Editor
    Volin as Map Tester Coordinator
    Damo and Hrdina Impéria as Map Designers
    Kayrie as Map Artist. 
    Discoheart and Noah.K as Audio Editor 
    Vultagx and Linkz as Global Moderator
    ElementG is currently in his trial period for Tech-artist

    But it would be unfair to not also give a shout-out to the members who left the team during 2023: 
    Katchau (developer) left the team
    Nukie left the event department
    Watermelon Lord, Nukie, Pfirsichkralle and Dallarian left the Moderator department

    Thank you all for your work for the project!
    Besides the team, I would like to give a personal shout out to Kapo and Dreamlord. You know Kapo from his CCC and Masters of the Forge series, but he does not get nearly enough credit for how much he does for the project and has always been a reliable friend, whether it be proofreading my documents, or getting a Rayman statue imported from another country. Dreamlord has been our favorite Banzaiii Lorrrd and I have been consistently impressed by not only his quality voice acting but his professionalism and willingness to help out, sometimes on short notice. Besides doing voice-overs for our trailers, you can also expect to hear him in our loading screen narrations for the new maps in 2024. I have high hopes for his voice-acting career, and I hope 2024 will be the breakthrough year for him! 
    2023 was a year full of highs and lows. My girlfriend and I got our own apartment and a lovely cat named Lyra. At the same time I saw friends struggling with depression, break-ups, war and death of loved ones. The world can be a rough place, so please take care of yourself and each other. 
    What was your highlight for 2023? And what are you most excited about for 2024? Would love to hear it in the comments!
    Thank you so much for being a part of this lovely community. 
  8. Ultralord liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  9. Dallarian liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  10. Volin liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  11. SunWu liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  12. Volin liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    In addition to the community update, I'd also like to take this time to share some of my personal thoughts as we transition into year 4 of Skylords Reborn. 

    3 years and 43 Community Updates in the books! Working on this yearly recap sure was a trip down memory lane with many "Did we really release that this year?". With so many moving parts and various things in development, things can start to blur a bit. Due to the nature of map making, this felt like a year in which we did a ton of work behind the scenes, but couldn't show off our hard work yet. I'm excited we can now finally start to reveal what the team has been working on.
    I hope our monthly community updates still managed to show we are hard at work, and had enough to reveal for players to feel engaged with the project. In hindsight, there were some things that we probably announced too early, (for example the Lost Soul Rework) but with so many variables in our project (our team now has 50 volunteers!) that is bound to happen now and then. I am extremely proud of the work our team put out this year, and I can't wait for players to get their hands on our new campaign maps. 
    Speaking of the team, we had a bunch of lovely people joining as volunteers! I am super grateful that 3 years in, we still have so many people with dedication and love for the project that they are willing to spend their free time on it. The following Skylords joined in 2023:
    CrazyCockerell and Titan as Tech-artists
    Piskr as Client Developer
    Pierakor as Tool Developer
    Lucas Ansei as Web Developer
    Ultralord as Video Editor
    Volin as Map Tester Coordinator
    Damo and Hrdina Impéria as Map Designers
    Kayrie as Map Artist. 
    Discoheart and Noah.K as Audio Editor 
    Vultagx and Linkz as Global Moderator
    ElementG is currently in his trial period for Tech-artist

    But it would be unfair to not also give a shout-out to the members who left the team during 2023: 
    Katchau (developer) left the team
    Nukie left the event department
    Watermelon Lord, Nukie, Pfirsichkralle and Dallarian left the Moderator department

    Thank you all for your work for the project!
    Besides the team, I would like to give a personal shout out to Kapo and Dreamlord. You know Kapo from his CCC and Masters of the Forge series, but he does not get nearly enough credit for how much he does for the project and has always been a reliable friend, whether it be proofreading my documents, or getting a Rayman statue imported from another country. Dreamlord has been our favorite Banzaiii Lorrrd and I have been consistently impressed by not only his quality voice acting but his professionalism and willingness to help out, sometimes on short notice. Besides doing voice-overs for our trailers, you can also expect to hear him in our loading screen narrations for the new maps in 2024. I have high hopes for his voice-acting career, and I hope 2024 will be the breakthrough year for him! 
    2023 was a year full of highs and lows. My girlfriend and I got our own apartment and a lovely cat named Lyra. At the same time I saw friends struggling with depression, break-ups, war and death of loved ones. The world can be a rough place, so please take care of yourself and each other. 
    What was your highlight for 2023? And what are you most excited about for 2024? Would love to hear it in the comments!
    Thank you so much for being a part of this lovely community. 
  13. Majora liked a post in a topic by Hrdina_Imperia in Community Update - January 2024   
    Thanks for all the hard work🥳 Let's hope for even better year!
  14. Markus34222 liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  15. Dutchy liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    In addition to the community update, I'd also like to take this time to share some of my personal thoughts as we transition into year 4 of Skylords Reborn. 

    3 years and 43 Community Updates in the books! Working on this yearly recap sure was a trip down memory lane with many "Did we really release that this year?". With so many moving parts and various things in development, things can start to blur a bit. Due to the nature of map making, this felt like a year in which we did a ton of work behind the scenes, but couldn't show off our hard work yet. I'm excited we can now finally start to reveal what the team has been working on.
    I hope our monthly community updates still managed to show we are hard at work, and had enough to reveal for players to feel engaged with the project. In hindsight, there were some things that we probably announced too early, (for example the Lost Soul Rework) but with so many variables in our project (our team now has 50 volunteers!) that is bound to happen now and then. I am extremely proud of the work our team put out this year, and I can't wait for players to get their hands on our new campaign maps. 
    Speaking of the team, we had a bunch of lovely people joining as volunteers! I am super grateful that 3 years in, we still have so many people with dedication and love for the project that they are willing to spend their free time on it. The following Skylords joined in 2023:
    CrazyCockerell and Titan as Tech-artists
    Piskr as Client Developer
    Pierakor as Tool Developer
    Lucas Ansei as Web Developer
    Ultralord as Video Editor
    Volin as Map Tester Coordinator
    Damo and Hrdina Impéria as Map Designers
    Kayrie as Map Artist. 
    Discoheart and Noah.K as Audio Editor 
    Vultagx and Linkz as Global Moderator
    ElementG is currently in his trial period for Tech-artist

    But it would be unfair to not also give a shout-out to the members who left the team during 2023: 
    Katchau (developer) left the team
    Nukie left the event department
    Watermelon Lord, Nukie, Pfirsichkralle and Dallarian left the Moderator department

    Thank you all for your work for the project!
    Besides the team, I would like to give a personal shout out to Kapo and Dreamlord. You know Kapo from his CCC and Masters of the Forge series, but he does not get nearly enough credit for how much he does for the project and has always been a reliable friend, whether it be proofreading my documents, or getting a Rayman statue imported from another country. Dreamlord has been our favorite Banzaiii Lorrrd and I have been consistently impressed by not only his quality voice acting but his professionalism and willingness to help out, sometimes on short notice. Besides doing voice-overs for our trailers, you can also expect to hear him in our loading screen narrations for the new maps in 2024. I have high hopes for his voice-acting career, and I hope 2024 will be the breakthrough year for him! 
    2023 was a year full of highs and lows. My girlfriend and I got our own apartment and a lovely cat named Lyra. At the same time I saw friends struggling with depression, break-ups, war and death of loved ones. The world can be a rough place, so please take care of yourself and each other. 
    What was your highlight for 2023? And what are you most excited about for 2024? Would love to hear it in the comments!
    Thank you so much for being a part of this lovely community. 
  16. Bonobobobo liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    In addition to the community update, I'd also like to take this time to share some of my personal thoughts as we transition into year 4 of Skylords Reborn. 

    3 years and 43 Community Updates in the books! Working on this yearly recap sure was a trip down memory lane with many "Did we really release that this year?". With so many moving parts and various things in development, things can start to blur a bit. Due to the nature of map making, this felt like a year in which we did a ton of work behind the scenes, but couldn't show off our hard work yet. I'm excited we can now finally start to reveal what the team has been working on.
    I hope our monthly community updates still managed to show we are hard at work, and had enough to reveal for players to feel engaged with the project. In hindsight, there were some things that we probably announced too early, (for example the Lost Soul Rework) but with so many variables in our project (our team now has 50 volunteers!) that is bound to happen now and then. I am extremely proud of the work our team put out this year, and I can't wait for players to get their hands on our new campaign maps. 
    Speaking of the team, we had a bunch of lovely people joining as volunteers! I am super grateful that 3 years in, we still have so many people with dedication and love for the project that they are willing to spend their free time on it. The following Skylords joined in 2023:
    CrazyCockerell and Titan as Tech-artists
    Piskr as Client Developer
    Pierakor as Tool Developer
    Lucas Ansei as Web Developer
    Ultralord as Video Editor
    Volin as Map Tester Coordinator
    Damo and Hrdina Impéria as Map Designers
    Kayrie as Map Artist. 
    Discoheart and Noah.K as Audio Editor 
    Vultagx and Linkz as Global Moderator
    ElementG is currently in his trial period for Tech-artist

    But it would be unfair to not also give a shout-out to the members who left the team during 2023: 
    Katchau (developer) left the team
    Nukie left the event department
    Watermelon Lord, Nukie, Pfirsichkralle and Dallarian left the Moderator department

    Thank you all for your work for the project!
    Besides the team, I would like to give a personal shout out to Kapo and Dreamlord. You know Kapo from his CCC and Masters of the Forge series, but he does not get nearly enough credit for how much he does for the project and has always been a reliable friend, whether it be proofreading my documents, or getting a Rayman statue imported from another country. Dreamlord has been our favorite Banzaiii Lorrrd and I have been consistently impressed by not only his quality voice acting but his professionalism and willingness to help out, sometimes on short notice. Besides doing voice-overs for our trailers, you can also expect to hear him in our loading screen narrations for the new maps in 2024. I have high hopes for his voice-acting career, and I hope 2024 will be the breakthrough year for him! 
    2023 was a year full of highs and lows. My girlfriend and I got our own apartment and a lovely cat named Lyra. At the same time I saw friends struggling with depression, break-ups, war and death of loved ones. The world can be a rough place, so please take care of yourself and each other. 
    What was your highlight for 2023? And what are you most excited about for 2024? Would love to hear it in the comments!
    Thank you so much for being a part of this lovely community. 
  17. Hrdina_Imperia liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    In addition to the community update, I'd also like to take this time to share some of my personal thoughts as we transition into year 4 of Skylords Reborn. 

    3 years and 43 Community Updates in the books! Working on this yearly recap sure was a trip down memory lane with many "Did we really release that this year?". With so many moving parts and various things in development, things can start to blur a bit. Due to the nature of map making, this felt like a year in which we did a ton of work behind the scenes, but couldn't show off our hard work yet. I'm excited we can now finally start to reveal what the team has been working on.
    I hope our monthly community updates still managed to show we are hard at work, and had enough to reveal for players to feel engaged with the project. In hindsight, there were some things that we probably announced too early, (for example the Lost Soul Rework) but with so many variables in our project (our team now has 50 volunteers!) that is bound to happen now and then. I am extremely proud of the work our team put out this year, and I can't wait for players to get their hands on our new campaign maps. 
    Speaking of the team, we had a bunch of lovely people joining as volunteers! I am super grateful that 3 years in, we still have so many people with dedication and love for the project that they are willing to spend their free time on it. The following Skylords joined in 2023:
    CrazyCockerell and Titan as Tech-artists
    Piskr as Client Developer
    Pierakor as Tool Developer
    Lucas Ansei as Web Developer
    Ultralord as Video Editor
    Volin as Map Tester Coordinator
    Damo and Hrdina Impéria as Map Designers
    Kayrie as Map Artist. 
    Discoheart and Noah.K as Audio Editor 
    Vultagx and Linkz as Global Moderator
    ElementG is currently in his trial period for Tech-artist

    But it would be unfair to not also give a shout-out to the members who left the team during 2023: 
    Katchau (developer) left the team
    Nukie left the event department
    Watermelon Lord, Nukie, Pfirsichkralle and Dallarian left the Moderator department

    Thank you all for your work for the project!
    Besides the team, I would like to give a personal shout out to Kapo and Dreamlord. You know Kapo from his CCC and Masters of the Forge series, but he does not get nearly enough credit for how much he does for the project and has always been a reliable friend, whether it be proofreading my documents, or getting a Rayman statue imported from another country. Dreamlord has been our favorite Banzaiii Lorrrd and I have been consistently impressed by not only his quality voice acting but his professionalism and willingness to help out, sometimes on short notice. Besides doing voice-overs for our trailers, you can also expect to hear him in our loading screen narrations for the new maps in 2024. I have high hopes for his voice-acting career, and I hope 2024 will be the breakthrough year for him! 
    2023 was a year full of highs and lows. My girlfriend and I got our own apartment and a lovely cat named Lyra. At the same time I saw friends struggling with depression, break-ups, war and death of loved ones. The world can be a rough place, so please take care of yourself and each other. 
    What was your highlight for 2023? And what are you most excited about for 2024? Would love to hear it in the comments!
    Thank you so much for being a part of this lovely community. 
  18. Dutchy liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  19. Bonobobobo liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  20. WatcherOfSky liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  21. Majora liked a post in a topic by Enraged in Spore Launcher Ideas   
    Gday and happy new years!  Saw the stream after the fact, congrats on the 3rd anniversary!  I rediscovered this a month or so ago and have gone back to my roots from the EA days by playing roots for most of my time!  The sylvan gate really makes a difference, very useful and enables map wide networks!  Have done every campaign map with roots including oceans (only 2 islands are unreachable by a single network if I remember right) and while I do take spore launcher in my deck, its advantages are fairly niche.   The main difference it has positively is its damage is more 'spike' damage rather than over time.  Only really useful on like bad harvest when trying to kill the shamans before their health jumps up, if you sync up enough spore launchers then they dont get that chance.  The disadvantages when compared to razorleaf are significant, primarily the anti air capacity, and when fully supported they both do enough damage anyway.  
     
    In order to separate them, you either nerf razorleaf (which id not suggest!) or buff spore launcher, but id say it needs to bring something different to the table as just slapping more damage on it might not be necessary when razorleaf fully supported kills most things in a shot!  Ive got a few thoughts on potential options that might help!
     
    - Adding more range and potentially an artillery type arc that shoots over areas you normally cant (doubt thats viable though from the feel of those areas).  Extra range is nice, opens up a few options on the offense, lets it counter other artillery type structures without being hit, but ultimately its not that much of an issue, can usually just tank thru it with forests vim.  Increased radius would be nice too, but once again its just a luxury.
    - Adding a disable to its attack, say the spore causes a delayed cast of ensnaring roots to sprout, or is full of paralysing spores kind of like the gemeye.  Something like parasite wouldnt be as good, as most things are dead, at least the delayed disable can catch the next wave, and stunning them lets the razorleaf hit them easier as it can struggle to hit moving targets.  Unfortunately thanks to the damage of fully powered up roots, most of this is as irrelevant as its knockback small and medium, as they are just dead.  Maybe if it can penetrate boss resistances it will have a more substantial niche?  Could have 2 types, one with root spores one with paralysis spores I suppose, but root decks are already pretty packed, very hard to add things to them!
    - Delayed explosion spores, so there is the impact hit then afterwards the spores explode for a 2nd wave of damage.  Could also cause the ground to quake and slow enemies, though I think the option above with roots bursting out of the ground from the spore seeds and entangling foes (and maybe bringing flying units to the ground if being really daring) would look cooler.  
    - Having spore launcher add some kind of passive effect into the root network, perhaps when it kills units it absorbs them and restores void power or something,  bit of a stretch there at long range but maybe the spores swiftly decompose them?  Root decks main issue is energy, being the amount locked up by expensive units, supporters and repeaters, so a way to get power back is nice, though ways to return power from existing units/buildings or discount them are better.  Dont really think spore launcher could do that though, and is too late to do a breeding grounds effect.  Maybe if when it kills things it can leech stored power into the void pool from connected units, sort of like some shadow effects, but represented by decomposing its victims in the natural cycle.  Once again, its probably a bit late for this kind of effect to work as you usually only need to add a couple of spores to the force at this point, having built the network at t3 and added the supporters and razorleaves, I find its just throwing in a few spores and extending said network for t4.  
     
    I think if spore launcher can become the damage/disabler with razorleaf being the support that clears air it would become much more tempting.  Given the damage of properly used root units, the better way to differentiate is if spores add alot of value to taking out bosses, as most well supported t2/t3 root units will clear out t4 comfortably, and if they cant 1 hit them then a 2nd unit with supporters just need to be added.  As to rpve, ive tried roots, unfortunately its just too slow and expensive.  At least in campaign mode you can settle in for a longer run!  Not sure if it can be made to work, would need cheaper support and network costs (or increased power gain) to get it set up faster.  
     
    As for forests vim, its pretty incredible being able to heal the entire network for that much over time, though the only one ive tried is shadow variant (havent got the other yet!).  I tend to just put it on some unit in the back, a fortress or thornbark near healing wells which can take the damage rather than a front liner who might not survive with enemy damage + vim transferred damage.  You could tweak the secondary buffs they provide, but as a healing spell its pretty solid.  
     
    T1 roots is a bit weak, tree spirits take alot of preparation to be great, but do have a niche on empires when they have alot of shielding in the first attacks.  The addition of more lost souls enemies with shielding would make them more tempting, but ive found archers with shamans tend to be faster and pretty much take you right up to t3 in most cases.  Purple sylvan gates ability is also a bit unused, but with the addition of more shielding foes it might come into play more, but with current shielding I find its easier just to use the red ones damage buff and if they have shielding just brute force through it.  Razorleaf could use 1m more range to avoid the annoying situation of other 50 m range units sometimes attacking while being safe!  Not common but does happen!
     
    Other ideas could be a healing well variant that can link to the root network, a breeding grounds effect on a t3 root unit or support structure to free up a slot in the deck, spells or supporters that add interesting effects to linked units (like poisions or slows or whatnot), maybe upgradeable structures too (fountain of rebirth getting a bit stronger for higher tier upgrades, root nexus getting a larger range, living tower causing a root effect on impact, healing well adding some percentage regeneration) after the success of soulstone.  
     
    This is getting a bit long so ill end it here.  Congrats again on the 3rd anniversary, looking forward to the new content!  
  22. WatcherOfSky liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    In addition to the community update, I'd also like to take this time to share some of my personal thoughts as we transition into year 4 of Skylords Reborn. 

    3 years and 43 Community Updates in the books! Working on this yearly recap sure was a trip down memory lane with many "Did we really release that this year?". With so many moving parts and various things in development, things can start to blur a bit. Due to the nature of map making, this felt like a year in which we did a ton of work behind the scenes, but couldn't show off our hard work yet. I'm excited we can now finally start to reveal what the team has been working on.
    I hope our monthly community updates still managed to show we are hard at work, and had enough to reveal for players to feel engaged with the project. In hindsight, there were some things that we probably announced too early, (for example the Lost Soul Rework) but with so many variables in our project (our team now has 50 volunteers!) that is bound to happen now and then. I am extremely proud of the work our team put out this year, and I can't wait for players to get their hands on our new campaign maps. 
    Speaking of the team, we had a bunch of lovely people joining as volunteers! I am super grateful that 3 years in, we still have so many people with dedication and love for the project that they are willing to spend their free time on it. The following Skylords joined in 2023:
    CrazyCockerell and Titan as Tech-artists
    Piskr as Client Developer
    Pierakor as Tool Developer
    Lucas Ansei as Web Developer
    Ultralord as Video Editor
    Volin as Map Tester Coordinator
    Damo and Hrdina Impéria as Map Designers
    Kayrie as Map Artist. 
    Discoheart and Noah.K as Audio Editor 
    Vultagx and Linkz as Global Moderator
    ElementG is currently in his trial period for Tech-artist

    But it would be unfair to not also give a shout-out to the members who left the team during 2023: 
    Katchau (developer) left the team
    Nukie left the event department
    Watermelon Lord, Nukie, Pfirsichkralle and Dallarian left the Moderator department

    Thank you all for your work for the project!
    Besides the team, I would like to give a personal shout out to Kapo and Dreamlord. You know Kapo from his CCC and Masters of the Forge series, but he does not get nearly enough credit for how much he does for the project and has always been a reliable friend, whether it be proofreading my documents, or getting a Rayman statue imported from another country. Dreamlord has been our favorite Banzaiii Lorrrd and I have been consistently impressed by not only his quality voice acting but his professionalism and willingness to help out, sometimes on short notice. Besides doing voice-overs for our trailers, you can also expect to hear him in our loading screen narrations for the new maps in 2024. I have high hopes for his voice-acting career, and I hope 2024 will be the breakthrough year for him! 
    2023 was a year full of highs and lows. My girlfriend and I got our own apartment and a lovely cat named Lyra. At the same time I saw friends struggling with depression, break-ups, war and death of loved ones. The world can be a rough place, so please take care of yourself and each other. 
    What was your highlight for 2023? And what are you most excited about for 2024? Would love to hear it in the comments!
    Thank you so much for being a part of this lovely community. 
  23. Hrdina_Imperia liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
  24. Metagross31 liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    In addition to the community update, I'd also like to take this time to share some of my personal thoughts as we transition into year 4 of Skylords Reborn. 

    3 years and 43 Community Updates in the books! Working on this yearly recap sure was a trip down memory lane with many "Did we really release that this year?". With so many moving parts and various things in development, things can start to blur a bit. Due to the nature of map making, this felt like a year in which we did a ton of work behind the scenes, but couldn't show off our hard work yet. I'm excited we can now finally start to reveal what the team has been working on.
    I hope our monthly community updates still managed to show we are hard at work, and had enough to reveal for players to feel engaged with the project. In hindsight, there were some things that we probably announced too early, (for example the Lost Soul Rework) but with so many variables in our project (our team now has 50 volunteers!) that is bound to happen now and then. I am extremely proud of the work our team put out this year, and I can't wait for players to get their hands on our new campaign maps. 
    Speaking of the team, we had a bunch of lovely people joining as volunteers! I am super grateful that 3 years in, we still have so many people with dedication and love for the project that they are willing to spend their free time on it. The following Skylords joined in 2023:
    CrazyCockerell and Titan as Tech-artists
    Piskr as Client Developer
    Pierakor as Tool Developer
    Lucas Ansei as Web Developer
    Ultralord as Video Editor
    Volin as Map Tester Coordinator
    Damo and Hrdina Impéria as Map Designers
    Kayrie as Map Artist. 
    Discoheart and Noah.K as Audio Editor 
    Vultagx and Linkz as Global Moderator
    ElementG is currently in his trial period for Tech-artist

    But it would be unfair to not also give a shout-out to the members who left the team during 2023: 
    Katchau (developer) left the team
    Nukie left the event department
    Watermelon Lord, Nukie, Pfirsichkralle and Dallarian left the Moderator department

    Thank you all for your work for the project!
    Besides the team, I would like to give a personal shout out to Kapo and Dreamlord. You know Kapo from his CCC and Masters of the Forge series, but he does not get nearly enough credit for how much he does for the project and has always been a reliable friend, whether it be proofreading my documents, or getting a Rayman statue imported from another country. Dreamlord has been our favorite Banzaiii Lorrrd and I have been consistently impressed by not only his quality voice acting but his professionalism and willingness to help out, sometimes on short notice. Besides doing voice-overs for our trailers, you can also expect to hear him in our loading screen narrations for the new maps in 2024. I have high hopes for his voice-acting career, and I hope 2024 will be the breakthrough year for him! 
    2023 was a year full of highs and lows. My girlfriend and I got our own apartment and a lovely cat named Lyra. At the same time I saw friends struggling with depression, break-ups, war and death of loved ones. The world can be a rough place, so please take care of yourself and each other. 
    What was your highlight for 2023? And what are you most excited about for 2024? Would love to hear it in the comments!
    Thank you so much for being a part of this lovely community. 
  25. Emmaerzeh liked a post in a topic by Majora in Community Update - January 2024   
    Greetings Skylords!
    A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

     
    • Skylord Reborn 3rd Anniversary

    Happy New Year, everyone! We hope 2024 will be a wonderful year for every one of you! 
    December 2023 marked the 3rd Anniversary of Skylords Reborn, and we are happy you are here to celebrate it with us!
    In case you missed it, we hosted a special Anniversary Stream last Friday, which you can rewatch here. 

    In this Community Update, we would like to take a look back at 2023, and share what 2024 has in store for Skylords Reborn. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started!
     
    • Looking back at 2023

    Can you believe it's already been a year since we added cosmetics? Here is a quick summary of every patch we released in 2023. 
     
    January 14th, 2023

    Early in 2023, we released our 2nd Anniversary Patch. The patch contained three new cards; Sanctuary, a Tier 4 Nature spell to go along with our ongoing Pure Nature rework, Raven Archwalker, our first Legendary card, and Worldbreaker Gun Promo, the first Promo building in the game. 


    This patch also introduced cosmetics; unlockable ways for Skylords to personalize their banner and avatar border. We also added 32 new achievements, many balance changes, and a ton of Quality of Life features; like a longer Marketplace option, more advanced filtering options including a handy in-game guide, and an import/export deck function.


    February 27th, 2023

    As with most major patches, our follow-up patch was a small one, containing some bugfixes, and the QoL option for players to re-roll the same quest multiple times. The minimum quest reward after re-rolls was changed to 50 BFP. 
     
    April 8th, 2023

    After our successful Halloween Event, we wanted to surprise Skylords with an Easter-themed event. While the map and general idea were received positively, we probably should not have attached a speedrun contest to it. Players expressed playing the map once was fun, but grinding the clunky Egg-push mechanic for the top time turned out to be a bit tedious. 

    Regardless, completing the special map ''The Easter Tree" on any difficulty resulted in the completion of the newly added achievement "Bunny Brawler", which automatically rewarded Skylords with a new Easter-themed banner. We saw that banner equipped a lot around the holidays, so we are happy to see it being received so positively. 

    This patch also contained some bugfixes, and a change to the friend list to display only online friends by default, a much requested change. 
     
    May 19th - 2023

    In May, we released another big content patch, called appropriately called Nature's Awakening. Alongside many Nature-themed changes, the patch also contained one new card: Sleetstorm.

    The spotlight for this patch, however, was on the addition of the Nature faction to rPvE, joining Fire as the second Skylords-Reborn exclusive addition to the game mode. Hodron spend a lot of time balancing the faction and making it fun to play against, which you can read more about in our interview. The patch also contained many balance changes, mostly focusing on our Pure Nature rework. 

    The patch also included many Quality of Life changes, including a single-player pause feature, key-down vs key-up interaction, the ability to copy text or import a deck from the in-game chat, and gold chests being openable in combat. Lastly, the patch also included our first part of our Gold rework, a few campaign map changes, and a rework of the community map section. 


    This rework allows Skylords to have an easier time finding great community-made maps, by showing more information, and having featured maps for maps that are especially good or unique. We also had an event on two of those great community maps: An Expedition South and Lyrish Uprising. We would once again like to stress that every Skylords Reborn installation comes with a Map Editor, so feel free to add your creations to the list! 
     
    July 25th - 2023

    Sadly, the major content patch came alongside some annoying bugs, the most infamous being the lag in the Forge after playing for a while. The issue should be solved, though we still sometimes receive reports of similar behavior. If this is the case for you, please report it to our team to investigate. 
    We also used this occasion to fix some inconsistencies in card descriptions and enabled playback for outdated replays. However, because replays are playbacks (instead of being a video), if cards were used that have since been changed, it can still result in not accurately reflecting the original gameplay. Regardless, it solved a major headache for our Event Department and Community Events to still be able to access replays if the game had been patched in a way that only effected a few cards that were not present in their replays. 
     
    October 28th - 2023

    For our Halloween patch, we added a new Pumpkin avatar for Skylords to unlock by playing the custom map Spooky Encounters once more during the Halloween season. The patch also contained one new card: the long awaited Soulstone. This card saw the longest development cycle yet, but we are very proud of how it turned out. 

    There was one more thing for Skylords to unlock: we released a special Fire-themed Forge, locked behind an achievement we noticed not many players were participating in due to the old lackluster reward. We are happy to see an increase in the completion rate after adding the special Forge. 
    Lastly, we also released a bunch of balance changes, bugfixes, and a batch of Quality of Life changes, like a higher deck-limit (500), a warning notification for queuing up with a low deck level for ranked (pointing towards the free PvP decks), and some improvements to comparing profiles. 

    The Fire-themed Forge can be unlocked by completing the achievement "Never Thought of Him"
     
    December - 2023 -> January 2024

    Originally, our plan was to bring out a patch for our 3rd Anniversary in December. Sadly, we had to delay after crucial staff members became sick. Which brings us to...
     
    • Looking ahead at 2024

    We are kicking off 2024 with our first content patch, and today we are happy to announce the patch date:
    January 26th - 2024

    Our first content patch of 2024 will contain various previously announced features. You can expect to see the new card Lost Manabeast, our overhaul of the rPvE difficulty system, our Lost Souls Rework, balance changes, and quality of life features, like buttons in the Forge to pause, speed up and slowdown. While we are trying to include previously announced cards like Tectonic Shift and Bedrock, technical issues are plaguing their developments, so we can't make the promise they will be included yet. 
     
    2024

    While we are not able to provide a concrete roadmap for 2024, we are able to share some general information about what we have planned for the new year. We have spent a lot of 2023 working on map-content, and we are very excited to share what we have been working on! The following content can be expected further along in 2024: 
     
    New Campaign Maps

    2024 will see the release of some brand-new campaign maps! There are currently four maps in development, three 2-player maps, and one 1-player map. The first two maps you can expect will be Unexpected Visitors and Into the Jungle, which are part of our new Key of Ashia story campaign, filling in some of the questions the original campaign failed to answer. In Unexpected Visitors, you will face the Lost Souls to protect the last Amii tribe, while Into the Jungle tasks you with finding a new safe haven for them. We did a short live-play of Into the Jungle during our stream.

    Unexpected Visitors will be the first new campaign map of Skylords Reborn.
     
    New Cards

    You can expect more new cards, including three for the Amii faction: Amii Golem, Amii Simulacrum and Amii Skydancer, bringing long-awaited higher tier units to the faction. We will reveal more about these new cards in the upcoming Community Updates. 
    Besides new Amii cards, we also have a couple of other new cards in various stages of development. 
     
    More voice-acting

    Alongside voicing our new campaign-maps, we are also working on providing voices for both new and old cards alike. A teaser of the Amii Golem was already heard in the Amii-teaser above, but we also have talented people working on Burning Spears and other cards that patched without voice-lines. 

    To navigate the players through the new campaign, we have also worked on a Frost Skylord named Gaeron, artwork made by our artist Tweeto. Gaeron was an Imperial Captain defending a Lyrish town. He is shortly mentioned in the original lore book in the game, and we thought he would be a fitting candidate to expand upon. We have found a great voice-actor to voice him during our search back in June.
     
    Balance changes

    We are always tweaking cards and looking for opportunities to make underplayed but cards with potential viable, and 2024 will be no different. Be sure to join our balance discord if you want to join the discussion and/or provide suggestions! A lot of the changes in SR are community suggestions, after all!
     
    More Map Content

    2024 will continue our vision of focusing on returning content. We are especially excited about Map Modifiers, special conditions that can be activated on campaign maps to provide new and exciting challenges. Modifiers that increase the defense of enemies, or cause them to explode once defeated, are simple examples that can already impact maps drastically. We plan to bundle these with a highlighted Map of the Day campaign map, resulting in additional rewards for Skylords facing the challenge. 

    Example screenshot of Map Modifiers. Work in progress.

    With new campaign maps, expanding on rPvE and Map Modifiers freshening up the original Campaign Maps, 2024 should be a good year for replayable content! 
     
    • Events

    Kicking off 2024 we also have a new event to enjoy!
     
    • NEW - Amii Training Camp
    While we eagerly wait for new Amii cards, let's find out if you fully master the excising ones! Play rPvE with only Amii Paladins and Amii Phantoms on Tier 2 and see how fast you can get! More information.
     
     • FIRST PHASE - PvP AI programming contest
    We are gathering players for a new type of event. Get ready for an AI Programming Tournament, where the submitted programs will face off in an epic showdown to find the ultimate AI strategist! More information.
     
    In between our monthly Community Updates, we host various events and tournaments, so be sure to keep a close eye on the in-game event tab and the forum calendar to stay informed and not miss out on any exciting events!
     
    • Host your own tournament / event
    Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our other Event Organizers, @Metagross31or @Minashigo Hiko. We can help you out with various topics and are glad to discuss potential ideas. We can also sponsor the prize pool for your event. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
     
    • Community Spotlight - Masters of the Forge

    In this podcast-like series, Kapo interviews various staff members to discuss the project and personal stories about their interaction with BattleForge and Skylords Reborn. There are currently 10 episodes to watch:
    • Episode 1: Dutchy, Lead Moderator - Watch now.
    • Episode 2: Majora, Project Coordinator - Watch now.
    • Episode 3: Volin, Testing Coordinator -  Watch now.
    • Episode 4: RadicalX, Faction Designer - Watch now.
    • Episode 5: Ult, Server Developer - Watch now.
    • Episode 6: Ultralord, Video Editor - Watch now.
    • Episode 7: Zyna & Ladadoos, Admins - Watch now.


    • New: Episode 8: Maze, Web Developer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Maze and Kapo talk about the moderation tool, different APIs, and of course in great detail about Maze' wonderful website, the Skylords Marketplace Journal (www.smj.cards)
     
    • New: Episode 9: Windhunter, Lead Designer - Watch now.
    In this episode, Windhunter and Kapo talk all about design, the priorities of picking what to change next, the state of the economy and loads of submitted questions from Fire-Frost to Deepdives, and what's upcoming in the next months and years. 
     
    • New: Episode 10: Emmaerzeh & Hodron - Watch now.
    This episode is all about the art of map-making, in all variations from campaign, rPvE and PvP-maps; with a highlight on how (community) mapmaking is done.
     
    • Contribute

    Skylords Reborn is a community-driven project fueled by the passion and dedication of over 50 volunteers. We are always on the lookout for like-minded individuals. If you have a passion for gaming, programming, design, or marketing, we invite you to have a look at our open positions!


    We are especially looking for an active and passionate outreach coordinator, helping us reach new Skylords by contacting streamers, influencers, media, and other potential parties. This role can make a drastic impact for Skylords Reborn! More information.
    Please consider applying for this position; we would love to gather both new and old players alike in 2024 to check out our new campaign maps. We are also looking for someone who can help us with our newsletter. 
    Don't have time to formally join the staff, but still would like to help out? Please check out this guide on how to support Skylords Reborn as a community member.
     
    • In Conclusion

    That's all for this Community Update! We appreciate you taking the time to read through it.
    As is tradition, we're including a scratch code as a small token of our appreciation for your support.
    The code will reward you with a General booster: LOOK-BACK-YEAR-2023
    The code is valid until February 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 
    We're always looking for ways to improve and value your feedback. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. We'll be back next month with more updates on our ongoing projects and upcoming features. You can also sign up to our e-mail newsletter here. 

    Archive
    • Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
    • Overview Community Updates
    • Community Update December 2023
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