Dear players,

First up: Happy New Year everybody!
I hope you all are doing great and have been enjoying the holidays!
Given the date I though it might be a good time to take a little look back at 2023, before making some new 2024 announcements:

What have we achieved in 2023?
Quite a lot! 2023 has really been the year of laying foundations for Horn of Balance:
- Pretty much all the character actions and items have been fully animated and completed.
- The first 5 areas and tilesets have been completed. With the next 3 underway.
- The game's engine has been expanded even further.
- A team member has been found to handle sound effects.
- After a bit of a search we've also found an excellent composer!
- Two demos have been released (not counting the continued support in between).
- The game has been approved for Steam (and is already siting at 350+ wishlists):
   https://store.steampowered.com/app/2738140/Horn_of_Balance/
- And  finally the game's pre-Kickstarter trailer has just released:

So what's next?
- The big one is the upcoming Kickstarter campaign!
A final decision about the exact timing and details will be made around February 1st. The support and follow counts at that time will factor into it, so if you have even the smallest interest in the full game be sure to follow the Kickstarter project ahead of time! It helps out tremendously! This is it: Tell a friend. Tell a family member. Even a like on the socials or a positive project review here on Itch will do wonders. Help us spread the word to make this game the best that it can be!

- Beyond that we also still have a few more incremental demo improvements coming up.
There is new dungeon music coming. As well more stability updates and potentially some more rooms and an item rotations.

- Someone has also offered to work on a French demo localisation. I'm currently hard at work with those preparations.
Note that the full game will be supported in multiple languages. This is just a welcome surprise for our French friends. (The full set of supported languages will be set during the Kickstarter campaign).

- And of course much more is being worked on for the mid and long term, but that's something for in another dev post.

Hope you enjoyed the update and see you in the next one.

Greetings,
Martijn


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For more "Horn of Balance" goodness check out:

- (Pre-launch) Kickstarter page - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hornofbalance/horn-of-balance?ref=discovery
- Steam page - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2738140/Horn_of_Balance/
- Discord - https://discord.gg/redHXyZ2Gc
- Twitter/X - https://twitter.com/HornofBalance
- Mastodon - https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@HornofBalance
- Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/hornofbalance.bsky.social