Happy new year everyone! We hope 2023 is off to an excellent start for you. Today, we are sharing our 2023 plans and updating you on our in-person planning days.

Planning

Bedouin and I met at the end of 2022 for our yearly in-person planning session. Across 2 days, we sat down and talked through all our goals, the future of HoFa, player ideas, and extra features. We also did quite a bit of business planning for our gaming studio.

During our planning days, we spent a lot of our time reviewing the current status of HoFa, features still to be added, and listing features we need to officially say HoFas gameplay is complete. During this time, we managed to list everything we want to accomplish by the end of 2023 in order to “complete” HoFa. This means our biggest overarching goal is to ensure HoFa is complete by the year's end. Talk about a new year's resolution! 

Bedouin and I are both back home and tasking ourselves with more in-depth planning from timelines, hiring goals (ooh), update schedules, business needs, and more. In previous years, we have revealed a full yearly plan in order to remove any mystery of updates and also receive early feedback from players. However, we are going to deviate from our usual year-long plan reveal and try something new.

Update Schedule & Plans

Development Updates

As mentioned, we are going to try something new this year and keep development updates a bit more mysterious than in previous years. We plan to release a monthly development update on the 4th Thursday of every month starting in February. We know this might seem a bit boring to most, but we do want to note that our first two goals are to officially squash every in-game bug and greatly increase load speed before we add a new feature. We also want to mention we are prioritizing features we have announced previously but have not finished yet, like explore.

As for player feedback, we are going to implement a new review process behind the scenes which involves more input from our current staff team, but also through utilizing the Premium Forum more often. After a feature is launched live, we will have a new feedback review process which includes collecting thoughts from the community as a whole.

Art Updates

During 2023, we have quite a few new feature development plans but also expanding current features and focusing on plenty of art updates. Art updates will be intermingled between development updates with some occurring on development update days. Art tends to take a lot of time to complete and with our current plans, some new additions are going to take months to finish. We’re looking at you, racing tack. 

Community Events

We also sat down for a bit and mulled over the idea of creating a consistent streaming schedule. We view HoFa as a source of information and education for many and want to share both Bedouin and my skills with our community. As of now, we are still considering ideas for live streams with the community, so if you have a request, drop it below. 😀

Also for the community, we are aiming to bring back in-game events that are both solo and team-based. We currently have plans for larger quarterly events and maybe even a few smaller events in between!

TLDR:

So, what should you expect this year?

• Consistent monthly development update schedule with new features, bug fixes, and expansions.
• Large art updates that include tack sets, backgrounds, items, and more.
• More community building through streams and events.

Our first updates of the year will be weekly roundups of bug squashes which will occur on Fridays during January. Then, our first development update will be on February 23rd. 

Next Update: Jan 6

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly