[From a forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Greetings Avatars,

We are excited to announce a candidate launch date for Shroud of the Avatar! On Tuesday March 27, 2018 (Release 52), we are planning to launch out of Early Access!

So what does that mean exactly for a game that has been both persistent for over a year and been doing monthly releases for over 4 years? Well, for us it means that we are delivering the list of features, including physical goods, promised during the Kickstarter albeit with a few exceptions and/or replacements (see below). It also means that we are going to grow our community through marketing campaigns

As we have stated previously, we intend to publish quarterly schedule updates detailing our monthly releases and those monthly releases will continue. Even though the goals outlined in these schedules are likely to change somewhat as we react to feedback, we feel it is important to periodically provide you with an updated roadmap.

Our priority continues to be to deliver new content to our backers regularly, so that you can give us feedback that will help us iteratively improve Shroud of the Avatar. This collaborative process continues to benefit the game, and often results in sweeping changes such as the recent polish passes to the user interface. As you have seen in previous releases, the flexibility inherent to this process means that we sometimes push things out, but we also often pull new things in.

Most recently we have been collaborating with our partner Travian to survey our backers on their experience with the game so we can correlate feedback scientifically with the metrics we are collecting in the game. Thank you everyone who has participated, your survey answers have helped guide our Top 10 priorities for launch and our Q1 schedule. Read more…

[From a forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Avatars,

Please read this entire message, as well as the linked instructions and known issues.

Thank you for being a loyal backer and follower of Shroud of the Avatar. Release 49 access for all Early Access backers begins this Thursday, December 14, at 10:30 AM US Central Standard Time (15:30 UTC).

NOTE: The last two releases of the year are much earlier in the months than normal due to the holidays (Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, etc.). However, despite the brevity of this release, you will see that we still managed to get a huge amount of work done!

Release 49 is the fourth release in which we focused on our Top 10 Priorities for Launch. We continued to made strong progress on framerate, story polish, and creation of  new scenes. We also created more side quests and tons of other new content, including virtue armor and holiday content. Read more…

In accordance with Portalarium’s founding purpose to promote goodwill and make a positive difference in the world, we established our Make a Difference store back in May of 2015 to coincide with Rize Up Gaming’s Water.org charity drive. Through that store we donate anywhere between 10-50% of the net proceeds from purchases of items made by our community.

Since that time we have added multiple charities including Autism Awareness, Breast Cancer, Blood Charities, Movember, and more. We have also participated in multiple charitable efforts with our amazing community like the Aerie Fund. This October we added hospital themed items to support Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals and Doctors Without Borders as well as expanded the Make a Difference concept outside the confines of the Make a Difference Store to over 90 items in the Add-On Store.

Through purchases of Make a Difference items by our community we have raised over $40,000 for charity since starting the Make a Difference Store in 2015! Our grand total as of December 7, 2017 is:

** $44,111.79 **

Thank you, Avatars, for being so virtuous!

NOTE: Items go on and off sale during telethons, weekend flash sales, etc. so prices visible on the store are not necessarily the price the item sold for when calculating sales totals.

Water.org $16,761.60  

To date, we have raised $16,761.60 for Water.org, from contributions by our generous backers through purchases of items such as the Ornate Outhouse, Wishing Well, Water Cloak, and /rain emote. Water.org is a nonprofit organization that has transformed hundreds of communities in Africa, South Asia, and Central America by providing access to safe water and sanitation. You can learn more about the projects your donation helps support here.

Read more…