Happy New Year!

It’s that time of year again, and with the January now underway we’ll be picking up development again this week.

We just want to take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you wonderful community members a Happy New Year! Thank you all for making the past year such an exciting and rewarding experience for us and we promise that there’s plenty more to come!

Seeing as we’re all reminiscing about what we’ve achieved in the last year, and thinking about our plans for the year ahead, I thought it’d be a good time to have a look at these things for Staxel.

Firstly, a little look back at what we’ve got done.

Back in January last year, we launched Staxel on Steam as an Early Access title, woohoo! This was our biggest moment to date, and we’re so pleased and grateful to be able to say that it was absolutely brilliant. Even at such an early stage of content development Staxel was received well and it was great to see so many people showing their support and leaving kind comments on what they thought about the game. It really gave us the motivation to continue developing Staxel over the past year, which brings us to our next point.

Since release we’ve added quite a bit to the game, the village has undergone some major changes in particular.

New NPCs

Much more NPC dialogue

New friendship levels (including the roomie aspect)

More festivals

New decorational items and building materials

New tools, including novelty items and sprinklers

More clothing and customisation options for player characters

World generation changes

Steam networking integration

Journal feature

More translations

And much more that I can’t remember off the top of my head.

The last few months however have been focused on the upcoming “Magic Update” which we’ll talk about a little below.

Looking to the future

It’s been a little while since the “Friendship Update” went out, and since then we did take a couple of months to focus primarily on fixing some of the most widely-reported bugs people were coming across. There’s still a little ways to go on that front but recently we’ve been working on what we’re calling the “Magic Update”.

This update has quite a few surprises in store, although no prizes for guessing it’s going to introduce an element of “magic” to Staxel (more on that in a future issue of the Reporter).

Other things we’re working on specifically are

Changes to the crafting system

More of a progression-based experience

Villager quests and storyline (for the ones who are currently missing them)

Places to visit

To name just a few.

We’ll be covering the last point in a bit more detail with another (short) issue of the Staxel Reporter in just a couple of days! There’ll be some screenshots too, so make sure you don’t miss it.

That about wraps it up for this issue of the Reporter. Thank you all once again for all your amazing support, we wouldn’t have come this far without you!

Best wishes for the next year to you all, from your Staxel dev team! 🙂