NEW Adventure – ‘Season of Sanctuary’

Dive into this specially-curated summer edition adventure! This unique season will take place in the newly unveiled vacation-styled islands in Daylight Prairie Realm. From beginning to end, it has been designed to deliver a retreat-like experience for fans playing and staying safe at home. Meet the new seasonal characters, learn about the back stories within the new area, and unlock the fun summer-inspired collectibles along the way! Check out the teaser if you missed the announcement:

NEW Merchandise

Due to popular demand, thatgamecompany will be launching a small selection of official ‘Sky’ merchandise during the anniversary week. Keeping in line with the studio’s indie ethos, the merchandise items have been designed with care and attention, produced in small batches at a time, and sent out with gratitude and love. It will be a perfect gift to send to fellow fans! Head to Sky’s game app, website, and social channels for upcoming information.

First Anniversary In-Game Events

‘Sky’ players will have access to a bespoke ‘1 Year Anniversary’ hat gift in exchange for hearts. Folks joining the area will also be able to enjoy other birthday-themed festivities and decorations too.

A Message from Jenova Chen

Jenova Chen, co-Founder and Creative Director commented: “Without a doubt, Sky has been one of the most exciting, challenging, rewarding and heartwarming chapters of thatgamecompany studio. We humbly launched Sky a year ago with the hope that it may emotionally evoke or touch people’s hearts… I don’t think we were ready for the players’ response or that over 20 million fans would get to play it. Its world has truly become the community’s haven to be themselves and to positively connect with others. We can’t wait to grow this space with our fans over this next year!”

Stay tuned to our website and social media news next week for additional details and news! Everyone is invited to join the discussion on our official Discord server at discord.gg/thatskygame.

The post Sky Hits 20 Million Downloads Ahead of First Anniversary appeared first on thatgamecompany.

Last month, thatgamecompany announced that it would look to create opportunities for the company and its fan community to participate in relief efforts during the months of April and May. Starting with Earth Day, we began by partnering with the global charity One Tree Planted to plant a tree in regions affected by wildfires with every Earth Day-inspired cape purchased. The event was an instant hit among players, with the final benefit results to be shared shortly.

To help with the fight against COVID-19, we are proud to share we are partnering with Doctors Without Borders and the #PlayTogetherApart initiative for the coming months. Read on to learn more on how to get involved.

New Healing Pack

Support pandemic relief efforts with the new Healing Pack, which comes with 75 regular Candles and a flower head accessory to show off your support. This new pack can be purchased in-game for $19.99 starting at noon PDT (UTC-7) on Monday, May 18th. 100% of revenue will benefit Doctors Without Borders to help with the fight against COVID-19.

Learn more about Doctors Without Borders COVID-19 relief efforts here.

We’ve heard the community’s pleas for another Double Heart event, and we agree — during these difficult times, it’s most important to find small ways to stay connected and show love for one another. Starting on Monday, we will be holding a Double Heart event, with every Heart or Gift of Light (partial Heart) that you gift a friend doubled. While the Healing Pack will be purchasable for longer, the Days of Healing Double Heart event will run for one week, and ends on Monday, May 25th at noon PDT (UTC-7).

PlayApartTogether with Sky

Alongside Sky’s Days of Healing event, thatgamecompany will join other game companies as a participant of the #PlayApartTogether movement. The goal is to promote the World Health Organization’s guidelines of washing hands and staying safe by socially distancing during this difficult time. With the support of online communities like Sky, we can do our part to stay socially distanced but not socially isolated by staying home and playing games.

Stay tuned to our social media and Discord community over the next month for additional ways to join us in supporting #PlayApartTogether’s message.

The post Sky: Days of Healing Event appeared first on thatgamecompany.

Earth Day in SKY

Let’s celebrate Earth Day by making a difference in the real world! We’re partnering with the charity One Tree Planted to plant a tree with every purchase of the Days of Nature cape. The commemorative Days of Nature cape is yours to keep.

The Days of Nature event begins at 00:00 PDT (UTC-7) on Wednesday, April 22nd and runs through Sunday, April 26th for a total of five days.

About One Tree Planted

One Tree Planted is a non-profit organization focused on global reforestation/environmental charity. As an environmental charity, they are dedicated to making it easier for individuals and businesses to give back to the environment, create a healthier climate, protect biodiversity and help reforestation efforts around the world. All by planting trees!

Learn more about OneTreeplanted at http://onetreeplanted.org.

#PlayApartTogether

In the coming weeks, we are proud to share thatgamecompany will also be contributing to the #PlayApartTogether campaign. As a global game, we are all impacted by these trying times, but support the World Health Organization’s message to stay socially distanced to help slow the spread of COVID-19. With the support of online communities, let’s do our part to stay socially distanced but not socially isolated. Wherever you are — by staying home and playing games, we can stay healthy, socially connected, and help make a difference for all of us.

Stay tuned for additional ways to participate in #PlayApartTogether and for more news on a special purchase pack in Sky to help support those affected by the pandemic. We are still ironing out the details of which charity, but we plan for 100% of net receipts to be donated.

The post SKY Relief Efforts appeared first on thatgamecompany.

You can dive into this heartwarming social adventure on Google Play here.

About the Game

In Sky, we arrive as the Children of the Light, spreading hope through the kingdom to return the fallen Stars to their constellations. Only by sharing light to awaken and redeem the perished ancestors and civilizations can the mysteries be uncovered, and the Stars be restored again.

Make New Friends & Grow Closer

The world of Sky is full of real players just like you. Befriend your fellow Sky children and team up together to adventure into darker realms, save spirits, and unlock multiplayer puzzles. Use candles to enhance your friendship and unlock interactive abilities like hand-holding, hug, high-five, chat, and more.

Crossplay is enabled so the Android players who have been waiting will be able to play with their iOS friends in Sky. If you are switching device types, you can save your progress and transfer your progress to any device when you link your Sky account to Google. This will also protect your progress if your device is ever broken or lost.

Unravel the Mystery

Take your new friends by hand and soar through the clouds together, and collaborate to spread Light back into the lands and constellations in the skies. As you explore the seven different realms, be sure to travel off the main roads to uncover the secrets of the world and history of its civilization.

Learn New Expressions

Save the ancestor spirits you encounter by witnessing their memories and returning them to the sky. Every ancestor spirit you save will add a star in your constellation and teach you a unique expression to add to your collection. Saving more spirits will also open gates into new lands.

Express Yourself

Advance your friendship with the ancestor spirits you save by gifting Hearts and Candles to them and completing each spirit constellation. As your friendship with each spirit progresses, unlock new outfits and special items like musical instruments to express yourself. If you complete every constellation star in one kingdom, its Elder will have a special item to unlock after you ascend to the Storm.

Fly Higher

As you explore the corners of every Sky kingdom, keep an eye out for Winged Light scattered throughout the lands. Collect these Winged Light to grow your cape and reach new, higher places.

Ascend to the Storm

Deliver your Winged Light through Eden to advance your cape and unlock the greatest rewards

Ongoing and Upcoming Events in SKY

Sky is an ever-expanding world with upcoming attractions, including daily quests, Traveling Spirits, Adventure Pass Seasons, and recurring events to increase the rate you forge Candles or Hearts.

Adventure Pass Seasons

Every Adventure Pass Season will bring six new spirits for you to meet – each with their own quest, story, and cosmetics for you to collect. Your goal during the Season is to find each Seasonal Spirit in the world in order to reunite them with the rest of their party, collect their unique expression, and then bring them Seasonal Candles to complete their constellation to unlock additional rewards.

The Adventure Pass is used to unlock Seasonal events as they arrive in Sky. All of these Spirits and their unique expressions are available to all players for free, but holders of the Adventure Pass will have a special pendant that will allow them to receive twice the rewards for every time they level up their relationship with a Spirit. This is an optional paid component to Seasons, which increases the rate at which you can earn Season Candles, and opens up additional rewards. You can either purchase the Adventure Pass by itself, or if you’re feeling generous, you can purchase the Adventure Pack which contains a Pass for yourself and two Pass tokens to gift to your friends.

Daily Quests

Each day opens up four new daily quests to complete for Candles. If an Adventure Pass Season is active, you will instead be rewarded Seasonal Candles for your efforts.

Traveling Spirits

Traveling Spirits are spirits from previous seasons who briefly return to Sky to visit for a four-day period. While visiting, their memories will become available to relive for players who may have missed them. Traveling Spirits will appear for players who have completed at least the Valley of Triumph level, and visit every two weeks while a season is active, and every weekend when in between seasons.To respect the hard work of the players who obtained Seasonal items during their original Seasons, currency costs of Traveling Spirit items will require more effort to obtain.

Season of Enchantment

The next Adventure Pass Season is on the horizon! Check out the trailer for the Season of Enchantment if you missed it:

For a head start this season, you can now pre-order the Adventure Pass and receive 10 bonus Seasonal Candles.

Days of Spring

Celebrate the coming of Spring with accelerated regular Candle forging in Sky. Forge twice as many regular Candles when collecting the same amount of light from the world. This event ends at 12 noon PDT (UTC-7) on April 13th.

Days of Nature

Join us in celebrating Earth Day by making a difference in the real world! We will plant a tree with every purchase of the Days of Nature pack.

Get Involved with the Community

Sky is better with friends! Dive into our global community and join the conversation with other players all over the world.

Join the Official Sky Discord

Join our growing Discord community for the latest Sky news, candle giveaways, new friends, help for your how-to-play questions, polls for you to help us improve Sky, weekly fanart drawing prompts, and more!

Share Your Sky Content & Fanart

The Sky community is rich in creative talent and we love to celebrate it! Share your Sky videos, art, music covers, and other fan videos on social media using the hashtag ‘#thatskygame’ to join the conversation and for a chance to be featured on official Sky social media.

The post Sky: Children of the Light Out on Google Play Now! appeared first on thatgamecompany.

Nintendo Switch will be the first home system and console release to kickstart our Sky series, and the team is working hard on providing cross-play functionality so that our community (iOS/ Android/ Nintendo/ future platforms) can connect and explore the kingdom together. We remain committed to developing Sky and to publish on more formats in the future.

With Android also slated for April release globally, we are focused on growing our community and continuing to deliver new seasons and in-game events designed to delight and surprise our fans.

In the meantime, here is a preview trailer for Nintendo Switch fans to enjoy:

The post Sky: Children of the Light’s console release starts on Nintendo Switch appeared first on thatgamecompany.

To celebrate this 10 Million milestone, Sky will be doubling the volume of seasonal wax available to players as a small “thank you” gift to our community later this week. We’ll have more news to share on our social media around the dates and times of our 10 Million Thank You event shortly.

We’re also amped to announce that we’re close to finishing the last round of development for Sky on Android devices, and will be releasing to Google Play globally by next month. We thank all of our Android fans who have waited patiently as we’ve worked tirelessly to deliver the game onto a new format. If you haven’t already pre-registered, please head towards: http://bit.ly/PreregisterSky

The biggest reward has been seeing our fans fly together and forge new connections with casual gamers, traditional players and non-gamers across the globe. Thank you for growing our community, and here’s to 10 Million more!

The post Sky Surpasses 10 Million Downloads, Android set for global launch appeared first on thatgamecompany.

Other winners included:
iPhone App of the Year: Spectre Camera (Lux Optics)
iPad App of the Year: Flow by Moleskine (Moleskine)
Mac App of the Year: Affinity Publisher (Serif Labs)
Apple TV App of the Year: The Explorers (The Explorers Network)
App Trend of 2019: Storytelling Simplified
iPad Game of the Year: “Hyper Light Drifter” (Abylight S.L.)
Mac Game of the Year: “GRIS” (Devolver / Nomada Studio)
Apple TV Game of the Year: “Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap” (DotEmu)
Game Trend of 2019: Blockbusters Reimagined
Apple Arcade Game of the Year: “Sayonara Wild Hearts” (Simogo)

As part of the event, we had the pleasure of meeting the other developers and providing a showcase of Sky to global media delegates.  It was a phenomenal experience and we are incredibly humbled by this accolade. 

Thank you to Apple, and congratulations to all of the developers who are part of the event.

For the full press announcement, head to: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/12/apple-celebrates-the-best-apps-and-games-of-2019/

The post ‘Sky: Children of the Light’ honored as Apple’s iPhone Game of the Year appeared first on thatgamecompany.

Season of Belonging

Hot off the heels of the ‘Season of Gratitude’ and ‘Season of Lightseekers’ comes Sky’s third limited adventure arc in the shape of ‘Season of Belonging’.  This holiday-themed season circles the story of a family who are sadly separated in the sky, and hope to reunite in time to celebrate together. Players can anticipate helping these new characters and unlocking new gifts over the next seven weeks.

New Areas, Collectibles, and Quests to Enjoy

• Team up to travel through six realms to solve the quests in order to uncover and reunite a family of the seven ancestors who have separated in the kingdom.   
• Unlock and learn six expressions from the family spirits, including Celebrate, LoopDance, Sparkler, Wise Stance, Don’t Go and Hair Tousle.
• Discover the family’s origins and build friendships with each member. Earn exotic new items to collect, such as: three new festive capes, guitar and ukulele instruments (two new music sheets), four masks, one pair of cozy pants, two new headwear, and an ultimate adventure season item. 
• Hidden Forest and Vault of Knowledge have been expanded with new areas. 
• Look out for the ‘Days of Giving’ event coming soon in the game.
• Added more Winged Light for increased player flight.
• There are new kinds of Sky puzzles to solve.
• New Customization / Closet features added.

Download or Pre-Register Now

Sky is free-to-start and currently available on the App Store, as well as on global pre-registration for Google Play. It was announced to be multi-format with Apple TV, macOS, PC and Console to follow.    

All features of ‘Season of Belonging’ can be activated for purchase at US$9.99 and for gifting with the three-pack bundle at US$14.99 within the Sky app.

The post Season of Belonging Arrives In Time For The Holidays appeared first on thatgamecompany.

Season of Lightseekers

On Monday, six new spirits will make their way to Sky, with one for each land: Isle of Dawn, Daylight Prairie, Hidden Forest, Valley of Triumph, Golden Wasteland, and Vault of Knowledge. Team up with other players and travel through Sky’s six realms to discover and help the plight of these new ancestor spirits.

If you are just starting out in Sky, you can learn more about the Adventure Pass Seasons and how they work here.

New Collectibles

Get ready to express yourself! The six visiting spirits come bearing exotic new items for you to collect this season, including two luminescent new capes, two instruments, three hairstyles, and two hats. After finding each spirit, you can see what collectibles they have to offer by selecting their star in the constellation menu.

New Umbrella Cosmetic

Protect yourself and a friend from the rain with the addition of two new Umbrellas! This is a new prop type, which you can collect from the Seasonal NPC located in Hidden Forest or as a reward for unlocking all of the Season of Lightseekers collectibles.

New Piggyback and Double-Five Abilities

Two new abilities have been added for you to enjoy with your friends:

• Carry. Pick up your friend and take them for a piggyback ride!
• Double-five. The Seasonal spirit in Isle of Dawn gives you the ability to upgrade your hi-five friendship ability into a fancy new double-handed version.

Lightseeker Quests

A new daily Lightseeker quest to “catch” the light around the kingdom of Sky has been added. Let us know what you think!

MFi Controller Support

We’ve been hearing your requests and wanted to give the community early access to MFi Controller support. Please note that this feature is still a work-in-progress, and there are still some features in development and bugs.

• If a gamepad is connected, it will be used by default.
• When booting the game with a fresh account with a controller enabled, the MFI controller tutorial will show. The controller reference page is work-in-progress, however.

Block/Unblock Friend Updates

• Added ‘Blocked Friends’ submenu to constellation (top-right) that lists all friends you have blocked.
• Blocked Friends list now supports “pages,” with 8 blocked players per page.
• Improved friend blocking wording consistency.
• Block button added in the in-person relationship menu.
• Added auto-detach handhold from blocked friends.
• Fixed a bug where the block icon doesn’t display when players aren’t nicknamed.
• Other small quality of life improvements.

Additional Balancing Changes

• Each consumable now has an on-use cooldown. This duration can be different for each consumable. A timer is displayed overtop each consumable, indicating the time left before you can use the consumable again.

New Account Panel

An Account Panel has been added to the Cog menu (top-right) that provides the following features.

• Assign your Sky profile to a GameCenter account (iOS only).
• Assign your Sky profile to a Google account, allowing you to play the same Sky profile cross platform (Android and iOS).
• A recovery tab will make it easier for you to find your Sky User ID and will one day provide you with alternate account recovery options.

Keep in mind this is a work in progress, so please report your experience to the team.

Updates and Fixes

• Light gifts in the constellation friendship menu have been replaced with partial heart gifts. It’s now possible to forge hearts from these partial heart gifts.
• Last build we made it so players can’t send hearts in the constellation menu until they have unlocked the ability in the in-person friend menu. It accidentally prevented players from claiming hearts that were already in-flight. This bugfix allows the hearts to be claimed.
• You can no longer warp to Home if you are taking damage.
• Heat and performance optimizations across the game.
• Friend connectivity improvements.
• Fixed various holes in the geometry where you could fall out of the world.
• Exploit protection implementation.
• Fixed bug where people spawned underground in Hidden Forest.
• Made instruments fix their key when background music is muted.
• General audio polish and fixes.
• Continual chat table improvements.
• Message candles now have additional chat filters to prevent abusive language.
• Fixed numerous visual bugs, crash bugs, and minor quest bugs.
• And there is something more…

The post Welcome to the Season of Lightseekers appeared first on thatgamecompany.

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Venture into the sands and explore the ruins of an ancient world to discover its history. Smoothly traverse the terrains with the all-new touch-responsive controls as you seek to ascend towards the great mountain in the distance. Players’ experiences can be enriched by the presence of an online companion in online multiplayer mode.

Beginning today you can experience Journey on iPad and iPhone, available from the App Store for $4.99. This joins the release to PC which was launched earlier this year. This momentous occasion furthers our desire to spread the joy Journey has already brought to so many. For more information, please visit the Journey App Store page here.

The post Journey now available on iPhone and iPad appeared first on thatgamecompany.