Tanky ship with 4 cannons a side and one front cannon You also needed the range of ships by using the spyglass which we implemented as an item. You can also turn the cannons too, which you couldn’t before. After much demand from crewman for more importance, experimenting with different methods we settled on the “grenade launcher” approach to cannon aiming. We also implemented a new cannon aiming system. Unfortunately this was not received well for the players that purely liked naval combat, so eventually it was scrapped. We had combined TDM with Siege mode to bring a mode called Conquest, which attempted to give more variance per match by letting players choose if they wanted to win by naval combat, or capturing the fort. So we introduced ship building from docks.
#Blackwake beta update
Update 3.0 was a huge undertaking, we wanted to give players the ability to choose which ship they fought with. First to 2 points wins.Ī faction would attack a fort with their ships, push a cart of explosives to a gate, then capture a flag to win. Teams would fight over a treasure chest to bring back to their base. Pioneering the naval genre at the time took a lot of experimenting. Over the course of early access we added and removed a lot of things due to community feedback. Comparing ourselves to other games in similar scope and price range, we expected around 300 concurrent players at launch and selling around 30,000 copies after a MONTH. We tried to be as realistic as possible on the player base and sales for the game. Our Kickstarter backers were a huge help in continuous play testing each weekend, finding bugs and suggesting features. Over two years we developed the game, hired out the necessary artists, animators and voice actors to push an early access version. The Kickstarter was a success raising $170k AUD. Many Twitch streamers took part in promoting the Kickstarter, we couldn’t have done it without Ngotie, evilBunny and Bikeman. That is when the comedic voice acting was born, we realized the game would be a hit. So in 2015, we attempted another Kickstarter, but this time with the aim for a more casual approach. We realised at that point that we took our game far too seriously.
#Blackwake beta full
A few youtubers, DarkLiberator and SMii7y tried out our game with their friends, to our surprise their time playing the game was full of laughter. While we were disheartened at the fact of this failure we tried to see if more people were interested in the concept. It was far too serious, and overambitious to garner any attention. We failed a Kickstarter in 2014, with the game catering to a more realistic naval sim audience, even though we threw in a sea monster at the end of the pitch trailer. Tyler saw Dakota’s small demos on an online forum, and offered to help push Dakota’s small idea into something much larger.
#Blackwake beta mods
Mods like Pirate Ship Wars and Battlefield Pirates were some inspiration in the initial journey in developing the game. There was a lack of proper naval warfare games that existed at the time. Blackwake started as an idea by Dakota in 2013.