As mentioned in our 2.2 announcement post, we've began working on our progression system overhaul. 2.21 introduces major changes to the leveling curve and also introduces the ability to prestige once you reach level 100 (which is now much faster).
XP you've earned so far has not been reset, and some of you may be able to prestige multiple times after this update. The prestige hasn't fully been implemented yet but 2.3 changes will flesh this out a lot more.
Here are the badges:
Do note that the leveling times will be adjusted. Currently it seems it may take to long to prestige to the next badge, so changes will come in the next update.
This is only a small fraction of what is on the way for the full 2.3 patch!
In other news the minimum votes to mutiny on an undercrewed small ship bottoms out at 4.
-OneEyeTyler & Dakota
2.2 Update live - Party Tag System. Die with your friends easier!
IF YOU HAVE DOWNLOADED THIS UPDATE, YOU CAN ONLY PLAY ON SERVERS THAT ARE UP TO DATE ON 2.2 VERSION.
Server owners: this will require a server restart to 2.2
Ahoy friends!
Today we've put out an update that we've mentioned before. The party tag system. This will allow you to stay together with your friends during matches.
How it works:
There is a party tag button in the menu, click on that and set it to a name that both you and your friends will have the same. It can be anything and it is case sensitive. Hop into a server together, and you may not be able to get on the same ship this current round. If you had the correct/same tag you'll see each other's name in blue in the scoreboard meaning that you are a party.
Once the round ends you will be gauranteed to be on the same ship, as well as every consecutive round after. Ship placement is random as it will be wherever there is room.
If you invite someone, or you join someone else through Steam friends, you will have tags that match.
- Another small change is that captains will be immune to cannonballs. Currenlty this is a tad broken, as it should be anyone using the wheel and not just the captain. A minor issue but it will be fixed next update. Damage from cannonballs to the wheel user completely depends on the width of the ship, so only small ships were vulnerable to this and the galleons were not. Very narrow ships such as the schooner had a very frustrating time. Grape shots can still kill captains.
Reasons for why: http://steamcommunity.com/app/420290/discussions/0/1368380934266492329/#c1368380934267193095
Our next update will focus on Progression and rank badges (playtime only). Similar to prestige ranking in other games, you'll have to level each badge from 1-100 before progressing to the next badge. This is purely to show off and we will be expanding acknowledgements of the player next update. Not only that some MUCH needed improvements will be coming to the game very soon. For example, weapon reload checkpoints.
Here's a quick preview!
See you on the Seven Seas!
-OneEyeTyler & Dakota
Blackwake Enters Steam Summer Sale for 20% Off!
Blackwake will be on sale for 20% off until July 5th as part of the Steam Summer Sale!
In other news our next patch, introducing a party system, is well on it's way! No longer will staying grouped with 3 or more friends be a hassle!
If you're not familiar with Blackwake or would like to show your friends how the game plays here is a recent fan trailer by Matroximus that is a favorite of ours!
- Fixes to bugs with previous updates that broke some elements of boarding gameplay
- Kickstarter rewards are in place and will be sent out soon
- 6 New hats to unlock
The future
We also would like to take a moment to talk a little bit about the future and our activity.
After CTB was released and we watched the player base slowly gravitate back to fleet being the popular mode we had to stop and think about where we were taking things. We went ahead with Treasure Trade, a more traditional CTF mode, and proceeded with caution.
As we were finishing up TT we decided that we would go ahead and also include the schooner and junk ship in the same update rather than a patch in the weeks following. Not only has it been a year since we've integrated a ship, the way ships are structured when added had changed quite a bit. We were delayed further dealing with the two new vessels.
Fleet returning to the most played mode made us consider what we could add to ship gameplay to have it be even more fun, because clearly land based modes were getting in the way of the main feature for our fans, ship play. For this reason TT is different than CTB in that it can still be played purely through ticket elimination and the chests are an optional environmental token.
We will be paying attention to the reception of TT closely.
After this update we are going to be focusing on adding even more depth to ship play. This includes finishing the spyglass feature, swinging from ropes, shot distancing, captains selecting their preferred ship type (each coming with a set of perks), sabotaging supplies during boarding and so on.
More player recognition is planned with more visible ranks and acknlowedgement for your work as a crewman. We also want to make it easier for small groups of friends to stay together without a fuss, so we will be adding a system to assist with that.
Blackwake has been a learning experience for us, we try to listen to every suggestion we can and take it all into consideration. We're not afraid to adapt our roadmap accordingly and that is what we will be doing.
Server owners Treasure Trade is "9" in config
See you on the Seven Seas!
Dakota & Tyler
Hotfix, Development Roadmap, Alpha v2.1 vessels
Hi All,
We've pushed out a fix today to fix 3 bugs:
- Can now put out people and yourself on fire
- Server leaderboards now fixed
- Won't die as often swimming to board other ships
We also thought it would be a good time to share a roadmap, for maybe something to look forward to. Aside from general fixes and polishes in between these are our milestones.
Alpha V2.1 ships coming
We also have completed 2 new ships that will be in the upcoming 2.1 update (straight after the Treasure Trade mode is implemented). These ships will be replacements for the hoys in TT and CTB.
Naval Schooner (8 players) Will have 5 guns a side, nimble but open deck leaving it exposed to small arms.
Chinese Junk (8 players) Much more cover for players, 4 guns a side with 1 front gun. It has no nose so it can not ram effectively, and no anti sails either.
Some outfits have also been completed for the Navy side:
We've also had some talks about a competitive ranking system, that will only apply to public matches. So it will not split up the playerbase, and will only be a representation of skill level. We did think it might be interesting to have custom outfits that can only be unlocked the higher skill level you are.
There are some issues present such as people stacking on teams, and we can't have rank autobalance as that would split up friends. Those things have to be figured out if we are to do something like this.
We are still trying to get our feet firmly planted in development and hopefully we can continue to make good progress. Thank you all for sticking around and we hope you'll like what is to come!
See you on the Seven Seas,
Tyler & Dakota
Update on connection issues
When we first released the game a small amount of you were not able to connect to any servers at all, even if they were empty. Some of you would also randomly disconnect after a minute or so ingame.
We could not find a reason for this, and since WakeNet is built above the Unity transport layer we decided to get in touch with Unity. Since we use 5.4.4 we were missing out on a much more stable version of the transport layer in the newer versions. They were kind enough to give us a custom editor build with the new transport layer only so we didn't need to fully upgrade (which can be messy in some cases).
Any of you who had connection issues or had a friend with connection issues we urge you to opt into the publictestclient branch on Steam (right click Blackwake > properties > betas) and attempt to connect to the PTS (blue server top of the list).
We will be monitoring feedback and will continue to work with Unity should there still be issues.
Let us know if you had issues before but you're able to connect to it!
Dakota & Tyler
Blackwake Alpha V1.0.0 release - Capture the Booty!
Avast ye landlubbers!
Blackwake Alpha V1.0.0 is now live and features the new game mode Capture the Booty! We hope you guys will enjoy blasting each other on land and fighting over the precious Booty chest filled with gold! If you've enjoyed capture the flag in other games it works the same way in Blackwake. Two teams of two hoys each will fight to bring back a single chest to their base. The team first to 3 captures will win. This mode is still planning to be tweaked and polished with further changes later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V7FuvNsPO4
While this Alpha version took longer than intended, the future Alpha versions will provide some fresh and interesting content. As mentioned in the previous update new ships are currently being worked on and will be shown in the Alpha V2 preview, as well as a different type of CTB mode. Some general improvements and bug fixes are planned to come also, with the resolve of some connection issues (hopefully) many of you were having.
We're super excited for you all to see the future updates and we know you guys will have a blast as a lot of things you've been requesting are on their way. Thank you to all of you who are sticking with us and enjoying the game.
(also a few fixes have been made, including tickets on other aspect ratios this time for real!)
See you on the Seven Seas,
Tyler & Dakota
SERVER OWNERS: Config is "8" for CTB mode.
Progress on Capture the Booty Mode
Avast mateys!
Currently Capture the booty mode is still in closed testing. It's near it's final testing cycles and should be ready soon.
We have around 10 tasks remaining to polish it off and we unfortunately do have 2 game breaking blockers. Once those are solved it should be ready to push onto public PTS or patched live with the polishes put in slightly after.
What else is being worked on?
We also have 2 new ships being worked on (one is already completed, but not intergrated), which will be the replacement vessels for the 2v2 hoys in CTB.
This CTB 32p variation is actually going to be CTB1 with a single booty chest, and a CTB2 variation is planned to come straight after with 3v3 vessels, and one chest at each tower, with mortars for defense. You'll have to capture the booty at the enemy's base and bring it back to your own.
The release for CTB1 will be called Alpha v1, and subsequent modes/content to follow version names. This update has taken longer than intended but it shall be in the hands of yer' crew soon!
If you would like to join in on the closed testing of new content, and help us stomp some bugs, when testing starts it happens daily/bi-daily be sure to join our discord! https://discord.gg/0riQVXihqadCPcl6
See you on the Seven Seas,
Tyler & Dakota
0.2.2 What's coming, community content vote, and more!
Today will begin our new patch notes schedule. Although we may do hotfixes during the week, our main patch notes/update posts will be about every two weeks. Of course, we may still do update posts in between when needed.
This patch will require all servers to be updated.
Spyglass is now available as a special option. Note that for now it is only slightly beneficial, showing you enemy ship captains/locations. It is also missing 3rd person animations at this time and will appear as a pistol (expect a hotfix for this). In the near future it will also give you information about the current damage state of that ship. The ultimate goal of the spyglass is to require a spyglass to spot a ship before your crew can see it by pressing Q. You will not be able to tell friendly or enemy ships apart (aside from the flag) until someone spots the ship.
Servers with friendly fire on will now have “FF ON” tagged to the end of the server name. Once we have more hardcore options we will classify FF under HC.
3 more voice actors added, two for pirates and one for navy. You are assigned a voice at random. Eventually you’ll be able to pick in the customize options.
We now support an official globalized ban list read by both official and community servers.
Admins can now do /endround to force a round reset.
Attempted to fix an issue where some servers would fail to restart.
The quit option should no longer register when the server list is active, since it is close to the refresh button and some would hit quit by mistake.
Attempted a fix for those who experienced a stuck player customization screen when playing the game. We recommend those who had this issue to verify their game files.
Loading screen should no longer run at a very high FPS.
Fixed issue when joining a friends server while in a server already.
Various anti-cheat measures improved throughout the week (these have not gone ignored)
An update on the connection issues:
We will be receiving a customized build from Unity shortly to update our transport layer. We hope this will show an improvement in connection issues for those who suffer them. If the issue is still not fixed we will continue working with them. We should have a test server up sometime soon for those of you experiencing these issues to try.
CAPTURE THE BOOTY!
In other news we have a new gamemode in the works, capture the booty! If you are interested in taking part in the early stability/balance tests be sure to join our discord. Capture the booty focuses more on land battles and boarding, which we thought would be a great contrast to those of you who have been pouring hours into our TDM modes. Two teams of two hoys will fight for a chest of treasure located on an island between your bases. Do what it takes to claim your riches!
Double pistol Boarding Pike Harpoons (throwable) Two Handed Axe (one hit swipes) Matchlock Arquebus(can shoot forwards and backwards)
Third person reloading animations
Swimming animation
Server whitelists
Note: Melee will be worked on when we have time, for now we are focusing on important critical things to sustain the playerbase/longevity new content. Also weapon sounds are placeholder and will sound much better in the future.
Community spotlight!
Blackwake - The Beelzebub Pirates
https://youtu.be/KwbZAUDaU4c
Blackwake: Early Access done right
https://youtu.be/uEuf6SScd2s
Blackwake | Crewman Tutorial #3 - When to use each type of cannon munition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQPgxwv1Rhw
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE AFTER CTB UPDATE?
1v1 versus mode for 5 friend parties (cannot solo que, will not put you into multi-ship matches due to complexity and balance, only for 1v1 hoy)
New game mode
VOTE HERE:
http://www.strawpoll.me/12547124
We want to be sure our time is spent wisely while in early access. We would prefer to add what the majority of our community would like to see and feels would benefit the game in the long run.
Blackwake forums for clans/events: http://www.blackwakeforums.com/
Blackwake discord! https://discord.gg/0riQVXihqadCPcl6
See you on the seven seas!
Dakota & Tyler
Small fixes & updates
Hey guys, we have a small batch of fixes since we've spent a lot of this week experimenting with the connection issues mentioned in our last update and also laying the framework for our next gamemode.
This update will require servers to be updated. Server owners should restart their servers. Soon we will introduce an automated live version check so this is an easier process, but until then it will need to be done manually.
<*> Tickets should now properly display on 16:10
<*> A very small amount of you are experiencing a bug where the player customization menu stays up when you join a server, this is still being investigated but it should be fixed enough to allow you to join a server. If you still experience this, delete cc.set in the Blackwake root folder and then validate the game files through Steam.
We're hoping next week we will have good news in regards to the connection issues, and also a possible glimpse of the next mode!
More permanent low FPS on high end rig ingame fixes: nVidia control panel
- Threaded optimization swith it to OFF
- Shader Cache switch it to OFF
- Vsync ingame to ON
Voip crashing the game on use or causing issues by turning you into a robot/garbling - Try and uncheck the two exclusive mode ticked boxes down below in this menu http://i.imgur.com/OI84448.png
Blackwake now has forums for Clans and Events if you aren't a fan of Steam/Discord/Reddit.
Join here and challenge other clans to war!
http://www.blackwakeforums.com/
