What a Year
The year is drawing to a close! We’ll take this opportunity to get sappy for a moment and recap all the incredible things that have happened in these past twelve months.
A Year in Review
Kickstarter
We started the year by getting everyone hyped up for our Kickstarter campaign to pad our game’s funding.
We smashed our humble initial goal of 60k € within less than 20 hours and raised just over 500k € total from 8889 backers, which allowed us to plan for various exciting additions like more horse breeds, extra crafting and cooking content and falcon hunting. The Kickstarter campaign wasn’t only a financial success, but led loads of you to hear about our game in the first place, getting us to an impressive 100 000 Wishlist additions on Steam.
Alpha Playtesting
With the Kickstarter campaign, we promised the almost nine thousand backers access to an alpha playtest, which we were able to deliver on by May 15th. By now, a bit over four thousand backers have redeemed their Alpha access, with the rest of you waiting for the game to be more complete or to become available on your respective hardware. (And if you WANT to playtest but haven’t gotten access for some reason, please reach out to us!)
How much time individual testers have spent with the game varies quite a bit! Some of you gave the game a brief try, others are already diving in deep: 59% of alpha players played an hour or more, putting our median playtime at 1h and 23min. There’s a few hundred players who already played the game for 20-50 hours! While we completely understand anyone who wants to wait for a more polished experience, it’s incredibly valuable for us to have the insights from that 5% of players who spent 20+ hours, and who can give us more in depth feedback about the game.
For another fun number: our playtesters have sent in over 13000 bug reports! 😵
Gamescom
Another highlight this year was our visit to Gamescom in Cologne in August. Gamescom is the world’s largest gaming event, and exhibiting our game on one of the main show floors along with the giants of our industry has been incredibly exciting for us as developers… AND it of course gave lots of you an opportunity to try the game first hand!
We did not only bring a bunch of gaming stations to the event, but an entire Mongolian ger! The booth received musical accompaniment from Zolzaya Boldbaatar, who also provides horsehead fiddle and traditional Mongolian throat singing sounds for our game’s music. Check out the pictures and videos in our post from September, if you’ve missed them!
A Ger for Naraa, Solid Snake, and Lady D.
Next Fest Demo
October brought our next major milestone: We made a public free demo available for everyone during Steam’s Next Fest. Although the playtime was limited, a lot of you were able to try the game’s mechanics for the first time and give us valuable feedback. The Next Fest was a huge success: over 50 000 people played the demo, catapulting us the rest of the way into the 200 most-wishlisted games on steam and over the 200k wishlist milestone!
The insights and preview coverage we received for the demo let us tweak our priorities for what has to be done before Early Access release, and we’re looking forward to sharing a much-improved Legend of Khiimori with you all next year.
They grow up so quickly (humble blush)
Press Coverage
Getting any attention of the gaming press isn’t always easy for developers outside the AAA mainstream, but thanks to the successes outlined above, we got quite a bit of lovely coverage throughout the year! Here’s your chance to catch up or re-read, if you’ve missed any of it:
(Note that since some of these articles are a few months old, they might contain outdated information such as our game’s old title or outdated release date information)
GamesRadar+: “This stunning open-world horse game smashed its $65,000 Kickstarter goal straight away, and it's bringing my favorite part of Red Dead Redemption 2 to 13th-century Mongolia.” Read
Polygon: “Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori has some of the most realistic horses we've ever seen in a game. 13th-century Mongolia is the setting for a horse game unlike any other.” Read
GamesRadar+: “This open-world game where you're a 13th-century Mongolian horse courier immediately proved more hardcore than anything Death Stranding 2 could offer” Read
IGN Germany: “Finally a good video game about horses? Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori fulfills deep-seated wants” Read
PC Gamer: “[…] the most detailed steed mechanics I've ever seen – Be right back taking a quick course on horse genetics.” Read
Community Contests
We’ve recently ran a handful of community contests on our Discord, and we could not be happier with the results. Over the past weeks, we’ve asked you to participate in a scavenger hunt within our Demo, and asked you to draw fan art of our main character Naraa. You have absolutely delivered! To celebrate our wonderful players and fans, we want to highlight some of your submissions for the recent fan art contest that took place in our community. We are legitimately in awe of the skill and creativity you’ve shown us here.
Finalist: Contest Entry by ampule
Finalist: Contest Entry by Claudia1103#
Winner: Contest Entry by agentequus
A Heartfelt THANK YOU
These dev diaries are usually about us and what we’re doing, but we want to dedicate this one to you, our players, followers, backers and supporters. Thank you for being an incredibly patient and lovely bunch of people and for keeping up your incredible energy despite some delays on our end. We see you all advocating for our game, creating social media content and fan art, and recommending our game in countless reddit threads at every opportunity. You are the best ambassadors we could hope for, helping us spread the word about this unique thing we’re making into the wider gaming world. Please know that every single one of you is appreciated, and that we do not take your support, your kindness or your patience for granted.
Many, many thanks for joining us on this wild ride ❤
Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:
#13 | EA Release Date, Gameplay Trailer & Gamescom Highlights
#14 | News about Game’s Title, Languages & Alpha Playtest Survey
#15 | Breeding in our Demo, Performance Considerations & More
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