Happy Birthday, HEX

One year ago, HEX ended its Kickstarter run as the 9th most successful Video Game ever on the crowdfunding platform and you all made it happen.

We’ve come so far in this trip, so first we want to thank you for believing in HEX and coming along in this ride to Entrath with us. Without you, HEX would not exist and we wouldn’t have this incredible game with a supportive, positive community.

Let’s look back a little bit at what’s happened so far and then give you an idea of where we’re quickly headed.

Summer

We closed the celebration stream on Twitch and quickly jumped on the promotion train, giving the games world a glimpse of HEX at E3. Producer Kyle answered panel questions at PAX Prime, and a few members of our team made the trek to Atlanta’s DragonCon. Our engineers burned the midnight oil to set up the game for LAN play at Gen Con Indy.

We continued to code cards, published our characters lore section of the website, completed a great amount of UI work, and generally prepared to release the HEX Alpha client into the world.

Fall

The next stop was launching the HEX Alpha client. The game initially allowed players access to the 4 Starter Decks, 4 copies of each Shards of Fate card, chat, and the ability to play matches against either the AI or other players. There were bugs, but you were all awesome and helped us find those bugs. We fixed em, fixed em good!

Over the fall season, we optimized our code to fix load issues and quintupled the number of concurrent users we could allow on the alpha hardware. Our R&D team made some changes to improve gameplay, and we worked together—HEX team and HEX community—to make sure everyone was happy with the improvements we made to the gameplay.

Community members were also busy during this time, putting up websites and creating Twitch channels for fellow HEXers. We even had our first Tournament of Streamers, a community-organized event. That tournament series would eventually become the HEXTCGPro Series.

Winter

Snow doesn’t fall here in southern California. We only know winter by the rain it brings. We figured there were probably plenty of you who wanted to escape the ice and cold. We launched the Apprentice Program to take applications for aspiring game designers to work for us, learning the craft of making cards.

We continued to grow the HEX team with artists, engineers, and systems designers. Towards the end of winter, we launched the Booster Draft feature for alpha testing. Good fortune struck and, with great respect to our engineering team, it was a pretty successful feature launch. The handful of bugs were fixed quickly and you players loved the drafting experience.

Spring

Moving through spring, we added to our lore content and Cory launched his Tumblr blog. The four HEX Apprentices made their way to Orange County, CA and began their own journey. Apple fans could shuffle up their digital decks with our Mac client.

As the season said goodbye to the cold of winter, we also said a fond farewell to the alpha client. We announced our closed beta date and launched it on April 25th. We invited everyone who backed us to join us in playing HEX on the new live hardware and new beta client. Players could open packs, spin the wheels of fate, join tournaments, and win prizes for their collection!

The Future

And here we are, approaching summer 2014. We’re over 9 (hundred) thousand lines of code right now for you curious engineers. We’re solidly into Beta and just released a patch to improve a variety of features. The next patch we’re preparing is a feature patch. That will include the first version of the Auction House. We’re also introducing Starter Trials, a free way for new players to add cards to their collection.

After that, we’re looking at ways for players to freely transfer cards between accounts and the tutorial. Outside the game, we’re finishing up some new player resources and putting together some cool weekly content.

We’ll be at E3 next week with more media outlets than we can count– even if we included counting our toes! We also have some announcements at E3, so keep a lookout for that.

HEX is also excited to announce that we’ll be at Gen Con 2014! More computers, more ways to play, more free giveaways, and more fun! We’re going to host some special drafts and set up the PVP LAN. Players can win new sleeves, alternate art cards, and mercenaries for the event. For those of you who can’t visit us in Indy, players at home will have the same opportunity to win the alternate art card, mercenary by playing in-game. We’ll be publishing the specifics about Gen Con 2014 in the near future.

So, thank you all for spending this last year with us and we look forward to the next year which will see the full release of the game– PVE and PVP. We’ll continue to improve the game and work with you, the players, to make sure you’re having the experience that you want in the world’s first digital TCG MMO. Now, we’ll close with this message from the man himself, Cory Jones.

WOW, it’s been a year already! Actually that’s the wrong… WOW it’s ONLY been a year? It feels like the Kickstarter ended years ago.

the amazing changes that have occurred for both me and game are so numerous its hard to believe it could have all happen in the space of just one year. I continue to wake up each morning with a singular purpose: deliver the most amazing and innovative dTCG product ever created. That’s the promise I made in the Kickstarter video and it’s the driving force behind everything we do. We are going to expand what it means to be a TCG. Our incredible MMO elements really open up a whole new world of gameplay innovation.

I think I must take the one year anniversary to apologize from my lack of understanding in terms of just how hard it was going to be to make the game I had envisioned. Yes, the game is taking longer than anticipated. The good news is that we have made huge strides forward. Every day, hundreds of players enjoy drafting (with me) and soon the Auction House will be here. Each month will bring more features as we march toward the game we all dreamed HEX could be.

Next week, I will be at E3 evangelizing the game and our awesome community, plus we will be taking the opportunity to give some sneak peeks at the name of set 2 and some insight into the new card mechanics! So, keep an eye out for HEX coverage. As always, I cannot thank the HEX Kickstarter community enough. It’s been an amazing adventure so far. For me, the best part of HEX has been the chance to meet new people that have become my close friends.

What would a birthday be without gifts? To celebrate this first year, all accounts will receive Princess Cory Birthday Sleeves with the next patch.

So, thank you and I look forward to celebrating this anniversary next year and for many more years to come.

-Cory

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