Updates to the Classcraft universe for Back-to-School 2020!
Starting this week, we’ll begin rolling out changes to the Classcraft universe — the vast world of characters, locations, pets, powers, and more that make Classcraft such a rich experience for students.
We’ll share the details on the changes in a minute, but we’d like to begin with a quick explanation of why we’re making the updates and exactly how we’ll be rolling them out.
Adventures in world-building
One of Classcraft’s goals is to make school more meaningful for students.
One of the coolest things about building a world like the Classcraft universe is that everything in it takes on a new level of meaning because of its relationship to what’s around it. The challenging part is the vigilance it takes to watch over that world to ensure a certain level of consistency and cohesion. Just having a lot of awesome elements doesn’t make it a universe. Everything has to work together.
We realized how much of a challenge (and how fun!) this would be when we debuted Story Mode last fall. For those not familiar, Season 1 of Story Mode represented the launch of our new Classcraft universe. Unfortunately, not everything within Classcraft neatly fits within that world. So last year, we conducted a careful review of all the intellectual property (IP) — our creative assets like maps, characters, etc. — within Classcraft and developed a path to getting everything consistent. This involved some tough decisions, but we’re super excited about where we’re going.
What’s coming to the Classcraft universe for Fall 2020
Enough preamble — it’s time to dive into the good stuff. Here are some of the changes you can expect for this back-to-school season.
- Powers are getting some upgrades. Motivation is one of the key benefits of Classcraft, and Powers play an important role in engaging students by giving them control over their day-to-day lives. Not only are we updating Powers to more closely align with the Classcraft universe, we’re also integrating some new motivational concepts into the changes.
- Warriors are taking the mantle of Guardians of the Classcraft universe. In a change that we pre-announced last year, we’re reframing the role that the characters formerly known as Warriors play within Classcraft. While the name might be the most obvious thing that’s changing, Guardians are also getting some sweet new gear that your kids are going to love.
- Mages and Healers are getting spiffed up, as well. While these characters’ roles are staying the same, they’ll be getting some new features to bring them in-line with the Classcraft universe.
- Falling in Battle -> Falling. Let’s be honest, the concept of “falling in battle” is a little macabre for a platform used in K-12 schools. “Falling” should do the trick.
Making the transition as smooth as possible
When deciding how to roll out these changes, we thought: “Maybe we should just change each individual element as it becomes ready — teachers won’t mind!”
We kid, we kid.
We’ve been hard at work over the past few months prepping these updates so that we can begin rolling them out before back-to-school season kicks into gear for most teachers. Not every element will be ready or in its final form until later this summer, but we’re going to stagger our release schedule to update the elements that students will encounter early in the school year first. You may see some elements while they’re still in low-res form, but rest assured, we’ll add the high-res versions as soon as we can.
The bottom line: We know that teachers have had to adapt to a LOT of change over the past year, and we’re committed to minimizing surprises while we make these important updates.
Thanks for your support
We hope that you appreciate our point of view on these changes. If you don’t, that’s okay! Our goal is to win you over with all the cool gear, pets, and powers we plan to introduce over the coming months. In the meantime, thanks for standing by us. Your partnership means a lot.
Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback. We know it comes from a good place, and we’ve taken it to heart. We’d like to use this blog as an opportunity to provide an update about the details of the IP changes and to provide some context that will help explain where these changes came from — and, ultimately, what they’re leading us toward.