Eleven new building blocks for a game backend, a cycle tracker that knows endometriosis, and a Mac app that transcribes three minutes of speech in about a second. That is what the last two weeks looked like in our own products. Here is the overview in plain words.
horizOn: the game backend becomes a toolkit
horizOn is our backend for games. It handles sign-in, cloud saves, leaderboards and much more, so development teams can focus on their game. On October 22 and 23 we shipped the biggest update so far.
Eleven new building blocks
These features are new in the server, the dashboard and the SDKs for Unity, Godot and Unreal:
- Items and inventory: item catalogs and every player's inventory
- Player Values: currencies and energy managed by the server, not the device
- Achievements: achievements with rewards that reliably reach the player
- Player statistics: counters and personal bests
- Friends: friend lists and a way to look up other players
- Groups: groups with roles and their own administration
- Chat: messages between players, with older history kept on the device
- Matches: turn-based matches where players take turns one after another
- Shared Objects: game objects that several players share
- Marketplace: item trading between players
- Player Inbox: personal messages and notices with rewards
One idea runs through all of them. When a connection drops, a reward must neither get lost nor arrive twice. The SDKs therefore remember what a player was about to do and can finish it cleanly after a crash. Every building block has its own view in the dashboard and a guide with examples on the website.
More for the free start
Since October 13, projects on the Free plan can send emails too, within tight limits. On the same day we removed Meta tracking completely. Since October 14, a Cloudflare Turnstile check protects the signup against bots. The pricing page also shows a full comparison of all plans, which is checked against the real limits in the backend.
From the cloud service to your own server
horizOn comes with the free, open source horizOn Simple Server in PHP for self-hosting. Version 1.5.0 brought most of the new building blocks there as well, with SQLite and MySQL. Chat stays in the cloud. New since October 25 is a migration path. You download a project's content in the dashboard, and the Simple Server imports that file. If you want to host it yourself later, you are not locked in.
Faster, more stable and better for Unreal
On October 26 several server releases focused on performance. Each request now needs less computing time in the database and the backend. Since version 1.10.2, the Unreal SDK loads in Unreal Engine 5.6 and newer without an incompatibility warning. The "Seagull Storm" example games for Unity, Godot and Unreal show the new features in real use, and the Unity example now also runs on Unity 6000.5. All details are in the public changelog.
If you are planning a game or a playful app with online features yourself, our game development page explains how we support projects like that.
BodySeasons: endometriosis, PCOS and better sleep
BodySeasons is our training and nutrition calendar built around the female cycle. The last two weeks were mostly about women whose cycle works differently.
- Endometriosis: A diagnosis of endometriosis can now be saved as a cycle condition. The report and the PDF show a fixed notice for it, just like for PCOS.
- Tracking pain in more detail: Besides the pain itself, you can now also record where it hurts and what kind of pain it is.
- Tips in one place: Tips on menopause, PCOS and endometriosis now sit together in one swipeable card.
- Daily impulses: Your own entries turn into short impulses for the day. On paid plans you can have them written with AI if you like, now in English as well.
- Sleep: Sleep can be tracked in more detail, with times, details about the night, the number of times you woke up and a note.
There are smaller improvements too. The start pages load faster on phones, and the app starts reliably again on iOS 27. The portal for coaches got a unified design and now works in German and English throughout.
STTBar: dictation on the Mac without the cloud
STTBar is a small menu bar app for the Mac. You speak, and the text appears wherever your cursor is. Version 1.8.0 from October 13 adds NVIDIA Parakeet as speech recognition that runs directly on the device. On an M1 Max the model transcribes three minutes of speech in about a second and understands 25 European languages.
Generated with the help of AI
The app preloads the model at launch, so the first dictation does not have to wait. The very first load takes a few minutes once, and STTBar now explains why. After that the model is ready in about a second on every start. With on-device recognition, your recordings never leave your Mac.
Four new Mac apps
In mid-October we finished four new Mac apps and submitted them to Apple for review on October 19. None of them needs an account, and each costs once instead of every month. They will appear on the Mac App Store as soon as Apple approves them. Until then, the product pages have all the details.
- FAIRevision: transfers confirmed inspection characteristics and balloon numbers to the new revision of a drawing and shows every change.
- PSTBridge: converts old Outlook PST archives into MBOX or EML for Apple Mail and Thunderbird, with no Outlook and no Windows.
- TrackSplit: splits digitized records, cassettes and live recordings into named, tagged tracks with cover art.
- TokenLedger: shows in the menu bar what AI subscriptions and API usage for services like Claude Code, Codex and OpenRouter cost, and how much of your quota is left.
What comes next?
For horizOn we are currently running load tests to measure how much the servers can carry, and we keep working on performance. Which of these updates is most interesting for you? Feel free to get in touch via ProjectMakers.