While 2020 was undoubtedly a terrible year in many aspects, we at Team Kanohi hope that we’ve been able to provide a bit of excitement in spite of that. To mark the year’s end, we’re creating our first “Year in Review” post, which not only goes over the progress we've made this year but also our plans for next year! If you've been reading our Blog Posts previously, you may be familiar with some of this info, but we’ve put it all here for you to catch up on. 

The biggest accomplishment we've made this year was our release of the 'Trials of the Great Spirit' Alpha build back in April, which was well received by the community! We worked very hard on the demo for BMOP 2.0, and we were proud of what we released. We watched hours of 'let's play' videos for the demo, and couldn't be more thankful for your support! In addition to the positive response, we also received several pages worth of feedback, suggestions, and bug reports. This was critical for us, as we didn't want just a positive response, but we truly want to make sure that TOGS is a solid and fun project to build BMOP 2.0 off of.  So we took this feedback and went to work on improving the game once more. Since the release of TOGS, we've reworked the Mask Powers, movement abilities, elemental attacks, combat system, and AI, all using a new 'Gameplay Ability System'. We've also improved our animations, Visual FX, Sound FX, and level design as well. This has not been a small task, but with the help of a string of new team members we've recruited this year, the progress has been solid and definitely worth it. We've also improved performance across the board, and we've knocked out the majority of bugs in the project just within the last few weeks! Playing as a Toa has never been this fun, and we can't wait to share the finalized vision of TOGS/BMOP's gameplay systems with you in 2021.

While it's not quite as fun to share since the details are still secret, we've also finalized the outline and game design for BMOP 2.0, which is an essential part of development! Going forward, every bit of progress we make will chip away at making that design a reality. This year also featured one of the biggest community celebrations of Bionicle, 810NICLE day, on August 10th. We were happy to have taken part in such a large community venture, seeing all the cool streams, content, and games from various groups. We had a blast doing a crossover stream with friends at Litestone studios, as they played through older versions of Masks of Power, and we played through different versions of their game, ‘Legend of Mata Nui.’ And While it technically started in November of last year, the bulk of our rebranding and community interaction as “Team Kanohi” started in 2020. We started our update videos, teasers, streams, and blog posts this year, and we’re glad to have been able to interact with the community even more. Our livestreams have been entertaining as well, which can be found on Jocool 1231’s Youtube channel. Replaying Bionicle games, providing our thoughts on it and reading your comments has been a blast, and we can’t wait to do even more in 2021. We've also had the privilege of sharing a stream to show off “Empire of Toa,” A Minecraft MMORPG, which is another fantastic fan project that you should check out. (And that we might be checking out again in the near future…)

While that covers the majority of what we accomplished in 2020, we do want to give a few shoutouts to our fantastic team, and welcome a few new faces and roles this year! We welcomed FreetimeCoder (Who previously made a Mask Demo in UE3: https://youtu.be/kGSGAENR2Zk) as one of our lead programmers, and who was essential for making TOGS more stable. We welcomed Marco Paulin, our new Audio Director who, despite technical setbacks, has made phenomenal audio for TOGS, which we can't wait for you to hear! We brought on ONI 3D-Arts from the as an animator, and he's done great work with many of the Rahi, as well as been a great addition to many of our Streams! We expanded our Art team and gained a Lead and Assistant Concept Artist, with JordanBrockway and LiquidElectricity respectively. They've been key to helping us develop the art style we want in TOGS and BMOP going forward. And last, but not least, we promoted Markle to our Social Media manager role, and he's done a fantastic job so far. This certainly doesn't cover all of our new faces or most of our fantastic team, but it’s fitting to give many of our new members a slightly belated warm welcome. As for the future, what can you expect?

In 2021 we aim to have at least three releases: The TOGS code refactor, the TOGS visual overhaul, and the 'Combat Trial'. The Code Refactor is a crucial step to completing the code for the characters in BMOP, and is nearly complete as we speak. The Visual Overhaul is equally important, as it sets the standard and tone for the rest of our project development, so it's just as crucial that we're happy with it upon release. The Combat Trial is our replacement for the follow-up Trials we had planned for each Toa. We had wanted to craft interesting challenges for each character, but after working on the Tatari we realized our time was better spent working towards BMOP. However, it's still important for us to do continuous testing on gameplay and characters, which is where the Combat Trial comes in. Here you will be able to face off against your choice of available foes, and playtest each Toa as they are finished. This way we are able to make sure combat and gameplay is balanced for the world of Mata Nui. And then there's 1.5- which is by far BMOP Legacy's biggest update yet. while the release day is not yet decided, it looms ever closer....

That's it for our year in review. We are so thankful for our community and players for supporting us and following us throughout all of 2020, and are excited to share even more with you in the coming year.

May the Great Spirit guide you.