This Monday, join your friends in exploring the world of Windward Horizon, a solo dev project and a sequel to fan-favorite Windward! The Demo will be live exclusively during Steam Next Fest! Explore a Vast, Open World You’ll begin as a young, unaffiliated captain in a vast procedurally generated world, where no two adventures will be the same, and you're free to do whatever your heart desires!…
As promised last month, the Play Test for the upcoming Windward Horizon game is going to be here this week for you to enjoy. Anyone that owns the original Windward game and doesn't mind running into a few bugs along the way can try the early preview build of Windward Horizon for free this Friday, May 17th, starting at 10 AM EST. To opt-in, follow these simple steps on Friday : 1. Right-click Wi…
The wait is nearly over! The long-awaited sequel to Tasharen's Windward, originally released on Steam in 2015, is finally getting a sequel, and it's coming sooner than you think! Windward Horizon aims to improve every aspect of the original, such as adding lore to the game, a robust economy system that governs growth, fully configurable internal ship layouts with adjacency bonuses and penalties…
I'm happy to announce that today marks the launch day for Tasharen's latest game, Project 5: Sightseer (available here on Steam ). If exploration, resource gathering and base building is your thing, check it out! In other news, Windward is officially getting a sequel! The development on Windward 2 will begin next month, using Sightseer's tech as a starting point (which should shorten its dev cy…
Ahoy, Captain! We’re proud to announce that development studios from all over the world have united to offer you the Pirate ‘AAAAR!’ collection, a special bundle of games about pirates! The bundle is available on Steam starting today and last until the 4th of July. The Pirate ‘AAAAR!’ bundle contains three games that are going to be your ultimate journey into the world of pirates. As you naviga…
I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you guys again for being supportive of Tasharen's latest game -- Project 5: Sightseer . Since the original announcement just over a year ago we've had 3 open play test weekends where many of you got to play the free prototype, as promised, and allowed the two of us at Tasharen to gather a great amount of outstanding feedback. We took all of your fe…
Interested in checking out the next game Tasharen is working on? You can do that for free this weekend! Right-click Windward in your Steam library, Properties, Betas, and choose "sightseer_weekend_2" from the drop-down. Let it download, then launch Windward and you will be playing the latest Sightseer Alpha. The preview test will last until Monday morning (June 5). Have fun, and I strongly sugg…
I have no words... I'm blown away by everyone's support for the game that let it get noticed so quickly. I expected it to take a few months... but just under a week? You guys are amazing!
Edit: Play test ended on the 26th of December. Thank you everyone for the awesome feedback! Until then, please vote for the project on Greenlight to help! As promised (and a bit delayed due to a curious buuuug), the Project 5: Sightseer pre-alpha play test for you Windward players is now live and will end some time on Monday morning, at least 48 hours from now. To opt in, right click Windward i…
Yup. It's true! W2 is now known as Project 5: Sightseer, and is now one of the games on Greenlight: All existing Windward players that are interested will be able to play Sightseer this weekend right after FatPlanetEntertainment's stream of the game, countdown for which will begin on Friday the 23rd, at 8:50 PM EST (7:50 CST, 5:50 PST) on his Twitch channel: If you're interested in the current…
It's no secret at this point that I've been busy working on the followup game to Windward for the past several months. Windward was an excellent project to work on, but I feel like it has achieved what I had in mind for it: a multiplayer action game set in the Age of Sail meant to be played with your friends. Now... I feel like it's time to move forward a few years into the future. When I say "…
If you haven't been sailing around Windward recently, and particularly around the seas of the Tasharen server, you may have missed some of the newly added content that has been in testing there recently. The kind of content that requires some planning, preparation, and patience. I am talking, of course, about creatures like these: Added as a "let's see if it can be done" feature one evening, th…
A much-requested feature, Steam Workshop support is now live: Create mods that change everything about the game -- from adding new quests, ships and skills to changing existing ones... and then put them up on Steam Workshop, sharing it with others -- it's as simple as typing /uploadSteam <Mod Name> in chat! As usual, for a more detailed explanation and full list of patch notes, check the writeu…
Just a little over a year ago Windward launched on Steam Early Access. What did I do to celebrate, you may ask? Why, I was completely absorbed working on the then-upcoming Fall update to even notice. Shame on me! Well, no matter! Now all of you guys can celebrate by feasting on the changes brought forth by the now-live update including new ships, improvements in questing / trading, adjustable a…
If you have a powerful Android device such as NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet or console, you can now take Windward with you wherever you go. Better yet, since it's the same game code, you can use your tablet to play cross-platform with your friends on PC, Mac and Linux! If you are unsure if your mobile device is up to the task, you can check the PassMark benchmark to see where it ranks, but keep in mind…
The crazy rush of the release is finally behind me, and now I get to look back on the whole experience and wonder how I lived through it. I can see it now... telling my kids years from now, "ARR! Back in my day we used to release indie games and sleep maybe a combined of 10 hours in the first week! Uphill! Both ways!" Which... honestly wouldn't be far from the truth. There are times when being…
Terrible puns aside, Windward has reached a major milestone today, officially leaving Early Access and hitting version 1.0! ARR!! Getting to this day has certainly been one interesting experience... From the day Windward was conceptualized as more of a jest at GDC 2012 when I walked up to a certain legendary game designer and asked him a mischievous question to today, it certainly hasn't been a…
Arr, Captains! Two days shy of six months on Steam! Has it really been that long? The time just flew by... Looking back, I originally thought that Windward would be in Early Access for about two months, but listening to all of you offer awesome suggestions on how to make the game better I kept reconsidering and pushing the date back. The "date" itself has never been announced; it was always som…
Ahoy, Captains! Another month of development comes to a close, and with it -- a boatload of polish! Oh yes, I went there! So what went down this month? Well, let's look over the patch notes , shall we? The most obvious additions of February will likely be the improved ambiance of the game with the newly animated tree cover and the NPCs that will now talk to you and each other as they sail about…
Ahoy there, landlubber Captain! Another month of sailing the high seas comes to a close, heralding more improvements, bug fixes and new additions for you to explore. Improved Steam integration brings forth Trading Cards -- a frequently asked-for feature, as well as cloud-based saves. You can now play on your PC, then continue on your Macbook without missing a beat! Speaking of missing things, d…
Ahoy, Captains! Windward has been out on Steam Early Access for 3 months now and in that time a great amount of changes have been made, as you can see by visiting the Google Doc -- and at the time of this writing there are 24 pages of patch notes! You can also find a video explaining how easy it is to create a mod in Windward: Nonetheless, long patch notes and modding support aside, the game is…
Happy Holidays, fellow Captains! The holidays are here, and with them, the stream of updates marches on! There is more to talk about than we can go over without a wall o' text, so we'll just leave you with the astonishingly long list of patch notes since our last update on the 5th. Aren has really outdone himself this time, so be sure to send him tons of hugs. Some cookies and milk couldn't hur…
Ahoy thar! It's amazing to think that Windward has only been on Steam for just shy of two months, and yet in that time so much has been added! Just take the last five weeks for example, in no particular order: achievements, custom world map creation, new ships (including a very unique one that few people will ever obtain!), ship customization, new items, new skills, reputation system, late-game…
Greetings Fellow Captains! We have decided to move the updates to a bi-weekly format, and so this one includes last week's changes as well. The last 2 weeks have certainly been busy! Achievements are now in, as well as multi-stage quests, a new special equipment slot, and the spymaster specialist. Aren has continued to make tweaks and improvements to controller support and overall gameplay, and…
Greetings fellow Captains! Apologies for the 1 day delay in getting this out to you, I was waylaid by offline life this week. Not to worry though, there has been plenty of work on the game in the meantime! After the extensive feedback on the damage/difficulty of the game, some adjustments have been made to keep it from feeling frustrating. It turns out that the game was treating level 7 and hig…
Greetings fellow Captains! Can you believe it's already time for another weekly update? Time has certainly flown! This week has been centered on a lot of balance and trying to get combat and AI feeling better. While this balancing will be an ongoing thing as the game develops and is polished, we want to be sure there is an element of challenge, and a need to employ tactics to win a battle. Chal…
Greetings Fellow Captains! Time for our first weekly wrap up, bringing everyone up to date on the patch notes for this week. For those who want to follow it day to day, be sure to keep an eye on the Google Docs thread, which Aren updates as he goes along! You can find that here: Some of the highlights this week include a new ship, the Corvette, ambience enhancements such as birds and fish, envi…
—
Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.