Hello everyone! Thanks for waiting oh so patiently for this year's first dev update!

The team has been cranking since the December 2024 playtest, addressing issues, bugs, and balance that were reported on Discord and based on our own gameplay with the community. It was great fun and incredibly valuable for the Fightland team to play with the community, and we want to do it again! We’ve also made great strides toward our launch content goals, getting several new weapons and secondary items modelled and animated, along with a 3rd map, new map modifiers, and a bunch of visual effects.

So if all of this looks and sounds like we’re gearing up for something - you’re right! We’re getting ready for one more Steam Playtest, and then on to Steam Early Access launch, both of which we’re targeting to happen in April 2025.

That means in just 10 weeks this groundbreaking passion play to get 100 players into a single action-strategy game instance will come to life! Fightland’s core concept remains the same, though it has evolved substantially as we tackled technical, server, design, and visual issues to get where we are today. As long-time tower defense players and developers, we love lots of units on screen, and we wanted to blend that with movement, snappy combat, and team tactics like never before seen. The idea of having a team of players large enough to form coordinated groups to tackle multiple objectives is still at the heart of Fightland, and we hope you’ll love it. As a reminder, Fightland will be free to play, with an old-school monetization mechanic - all items unlockable through gameplay or via direct purchase as an IAP. No soft currency purchase loops!

One of the things that we learned from the December playtest was that we don’t need 100 players in an instance for the game to be fun. We played games with as few as 8 players on a team and still had great fun, so we will be letting games kick off with fewer than 100 players, with voting options to let players in each instance have a say in when games start.

Another thing we learned was that we need to give more time to notify interested players to sign up, mark their calendars, share with their friends, and have flexible times to play. To that end we’ll be sharing more frequent development updates and visuals, and give advance notice for the next playtest signup and playtest dates. These are the timeframes we’re planning for now, subject to change and feedback of course:

• Late March 2025 - building Steam Playtest buzz and signups
  
• Early-Mid April 2025 - Playtest
  
• Late April 2025 - Early Access Steam launch
  
• Late June 2025 - Full Launch on Steam, Apple App Store, Google Play Store

To stay up to date on these timeframes, we will be continuing to post here on the Fightland Reddit so please make sure to join. However, game matches, session times and coordinated play time will be happening over on our Discord so make sure you have joined us there! http://discord.gg/ninjakiwi

We cannot wait to share our full build with you all in the playtest!

Thanks so much for reading and see you soon!

-The Ninja Kiwi Team