Twin Skies developers made a surprising announcement today on their official forums. The game, once touted as being a hybrid 3D-MMO/Social Networking game primarily aimed at the tweens crowd, is now on tap to become a Flash-based 2D free-to-play game with more emphasis on social networking apps. Read the announcement below:

Hello everybody! This is going to be a long post, so go fetch a hot drink or something. Happy new Year to everybody first of all. We're back after the holiday season, I've got over my nasty cold (25th-29th - what awesome timing), and we thought that updating everybody as to the future of Twin Skies is LONG overdue.

A lot of things have changed in the last few months, we've taken a few steps back and realised that creating a 3D MMO is really, really hard, especially in this economy. We've come so far with the design, quests, and lore, but we feel that it's just a really risky and bad time to try and follow through with our plans and complete the game. Donna and myself have a much stronger background in 2D content (at least that's what it says on our resumes) and this is the direction we feel the company should pursue.

So... we're not doing a 3D MMO any more. If things go well its certainly an option for us in the future, but its not something we're going to make a decision on for the next year at least. Twin Skies is going to be in 2D, made in Flash and it's going to be free to play. It'll be the same world, the same monsters, the same Canopy Elves, Humans, Merfolk, Walrus Men, Bus Drivers etc., however it will be set in a different period of time, before the meteors struck and all the chaos started happening.

You'll still be able to go on adventures, craft items, join guilds, raise pets, grow magical plants, trade, and play minigames for points, it's just going to be more accessible, a little bit cuter and hopefully easier to make.

This also means that it's going to work on your Macbook, Jonny :)

We are also focusing heavily on social networking apps. Our first major release "Vikings Pirates Ninjas" is coming out in January and we hope you all play it. It's not Twin Skies related but it's going to have the same sort of humour and art so you never know, you may like it :) All our social networking games will eventually be on their own website too - so you won't have to sign up with Facebook or MySpace to play.

We launched Twin Skies Tower Defence a few weeks ago too. It's fun but we've seen some major design problems so it's sort of on hold for a few months. Don't worry, it will come back with lots of new features and it'll hopefully be much more playable. It's just not our major focus right now.

As for when Twin Skies 2D is going to be released, we're not sure. I'll try and keep you updated. We really hope that we can put something up in 2009 but it's just a really chaotic time right now, so watch this space. The Twin Skies website is probably going to undergo a lot of changes as a great deal of it isn't relevant any more. Don't worry all the achievements, meteorites and items that you have earned will be carried over into TS 2D.

So that's it really, I hope it doesn't come of too much of a shock. You must have all thought something was up as we stopped updating the site :( I'll try and find some sneak previews of what the new game is going to look like, and maybe post some stuff from our Vikings game too.

Have a great 2009, and if you have any questions please post them here and I'll reply later on!

Lastly, I can confirm that we're working on a new Virtual Pet site. It's going to have some elements of Twin Skies but won't be set in the Twin Skies universe. I'm not going to say anything more though, Donna would shout at me if I gave the game away!

Thanks,
Adam

As the original developers of NeoPets Online, the last bit about a new pet site should be good news for fans.