Windward Horizon is an upcoming RPG-adventure set on the high seas, a sequel to the game Windward released on Steam in 2015. Trade, quest, fight, or just sail the world and fish — it’s your choice, and you can do it alone or together with your friends.

You will start as a young pirate with few friends and no port to call your own. Whether you follow the game’s story or sail freely, you will soon encounter other faction leaders that seek to establish their mark upon the world. It will be your choice to join one of the factions or make it all on your own.

Each Windward Horizon campaign features a large procedurally generated world, and no two games will be quite alike. Although you will start in a small ship with few to no skills, as you gain experience and level up, you will acquire talent points. These points can be used to unlock new useful talents in either Defense, Offense or Support specializations. Each of these 3 talent trees contains a different set of skills and abilities, and sub-paths you can choose for a powerful build that suits your playstyle. You can even mix-and-match talents from different specializations to make your own unique build. Many of the crew, mates, and captains you can acquire have their own skills as well, expanding your toolkit further.

Whether you want your ship to be a tough juggernaut that can take a beating and stay afloat, a quick agile schooner that rains fire and explosive barrels on enemies from afar, or someone that keeps your allies afloat by fixing the damage inflicted upon them, you are certain to find something to enjoy. Since the ship’s equipment layout is fully customizable, you can even choose to replace all cannons with armor instead and focus on simply ramming your enemies to death. Whatever works, right?

If the action-filled combat is not really your thing, you can simply sail the seas, discover provinces and towns, engage in trading to earn a profit, fish and dive for treasure, or take up quests for factions in order to advance their agenda. All actions have consequences — provinces require resources in order to function, and providing them will lead to their towns growing and becoming more prosperous. Faction leaders will seek to involve you in their agendas, and helping one may hinder another. Help someone enough times and they may even take over governing the province — which is a way to effectively capture it without bloodshed.

Of course the funds you acquire throughout your journey are not used solely for trading or purchasing equipment upgrades. They can also be used to purchase entirely new ships. Surely you won’t want to sail in a Sloop forever? How about a fast Schooner to explore with, or a massive Frigate to carry all your plunder? Or perhaps a Brigantine is more your style? You can own them all.

However you choose to play the game, it’s best to do it with your friends as Windward Horizon was designed with co-op in mind. So bring your friends, your family, your parrot, put on your sailing pants and then go plunder some booty together.

Windward Horizon is coming to Steam in 2024.

Tasharen’s privacy policy is super simple: Tasharen’s games don’t collect any personal data about you or your device, so we have no reason to have a privacy policy in place. There are two notes of interest, however.

First, in order to identify your game, an ID will be used. On Steam, that’s your Steam ID. On other platforms — GOG, Google Play, Humble Bundle, etc. — that will either be a custom username you chose, a randomly generated numeric ID created the first time you launch the game, or your machine ID — depending on the game. A machine ID is just an anonymous alphanumeric number that is used to uniquely identify your device. It’s used as a unique ID for player save files when the Steam ID is not available.

Second exception is the game engine used for Tasharen’s games: Unity. Unity does collect more detailed (but still anonymous) statistics about your hardware that are used to keep track of what kind of devices are used in the world in order for them to have a better understanding of where to focus their development time. The hardware data is completely anonymous, and is used to create interesting charts found at their website: https://hwstats.unity3d.com/

So that’s it! In short, Tasharen’s games don’t collect any data that may be used to violate your privacy in any way.

And that’s the way it should be.

With Windward being so close to 1.0 release, I found myself looking back at the development process that got the game so far — the good, the bad and the unexpected. It was certainly an interesting project!

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It has certainly been a while since the last post here. Looking back over the past year, I haven’t had that much time, which is understandable given the events.

At first I was with Unity Technologies, working on rebooting their UI system which was meant to be a successor for NGUI, then after I parted ways with them I was too busy with NGUI — getting it into shape, doing support, all that… And yet, somehow toward the end there I managed to return to Windward — the first game that started it all — from my venture onto the Asset Store to the development of NGUI itself.

With fresh energy driving me forward I was able to restart the project pretty much from scratch, keeping only the music and the 3D models (the latter of which I had to partially re-do, but that’s not important). Now, not even 2.5 months later Windward has been released for Steam Early Access to get the player’s feedback on the new game.

Compared to the Windward from 2012 it’s a completely different beast. Gone are the skirmish maps, replaced with large, procedurally generated worlds. Gone are the healing cannonballs and all the abilities, replaced with new mechanics and talents. The progression was changed, adding questing and trading to the mix. The game itself was redone to use TNet instead of Unity networking, which not only stabilized the multiplayer but also added the ability to save the game for free (just how TNet works!).

All in all, it has been a hectic, furious two months of development — and I enjoyed every minute of it. And now, with roughly a month to go until the full release I’m now focusing on gathering player feedback and incorporating their desired changes into the game.

Despite what most people may think, the inspiration for Starlink was not Galcon or Eufloria, but actually another fantastic indie game — FTL.

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