Pre-season summer update

Dear villagers,

As the sun starts to set on our exciting beta season and TGE, the warmth of the summer season is quickly returning to us in Europe. Having had some time to evaluate and strategize, we’re eager to share another update of the progress we’ve made these past 2 months, and provide some more insight into the next few months that lie ahead.

Game Development

During our March Beta Season we once again collected a mountain of valuable feedback from the thousands of players that came to try Castle of Blackwater. From first-time-users to seasoned veterans, we gathered a tremendous amount of data, and have been hard at work in implementing new features and changes. Here are some new features that we’re most excited about:

Werewolf Rework:
Our community’s favourite character “The Werewolf” has received a much needed rebalancing. With his new active ability “Prey”, The Werewolf can now select another player during the day to become his prey. This unfortunate target player will be forced to stay in the castle at night, getting hunted by the wolf with a suspenseful soundtrack playing in the background.

The result of this change has been well-received by our players, and has led to some incredible moments such as this one: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZIJntp2RX/

Chat Bubbles
One of the most important insights we gained from beta season is that not everyone uses a microphone! In a game where communication is critical, players without a mic struggled to find enough opportunities to express themselves. To solve this, we introduced chat bubbles!

Chat bubbles offer a proximity-based text chat solution for all players who want to communicate without using a microphone.

Shop & Cosmetics
As we speak, we’re working on the systems that allow players to show off their cosmetics in-game and really create their own character style. To facilitate this, we’re building an interactive cosmetics inventory where players can refine their outfit:

At the same time, we’re also working on the cosmetics shop, where players will be able to purchase new cosmetics, spin the daily wheel of fortune, and check out exciting daily deals:

Marketing

These past few weeks have allowed us to explore new marketing channels and opportunities, and conduct experiments to help refine our future strategy. We’ve been actively posting short videos on TikTok (click me), and raising awareness of our project’s existence by posting organic content on Reddit (click me). We also currently have an ongoing social campaign with Earn Alliance, helping us gain more followers, fans and Steam wishlists.

Later this month our founders will be visiting TwitchCon Europe in Rotterdam, looking to connect and establish relations with some of the top gaming streamers in the world. On Telegram we’re currently experimenting with prize-pool minigames, and our Discord Engage marketplace is once again proving to be a great source of traffic and community engagement.

Furthermore, we’re continuously organising cross-community game nights, in order to maintain a steady flow of new players to find out about us. Next week, we have game nights planned with Uldor, Walker World and Love Monsters to name a few of our partner communities.

What’s Next

Right now, we’re in the process of hiring and onboarding some extra game development capacity to help expedite our timeline until Steam launch. Our new intern, Kasper, started with us this week, and is currently learning to build and implement new minigames into the castle. Another new developer, Murat, will be joining the team as of next month. New developers always take some time to find their way in our giant codebase, but we’re confident that they will soon become valuable assets to our growing team.

In the next few months, our focus will remain on building out all of the supporting features that will get Castle of Blackwater ready for full release. This involves things like economy, social features, progression systems, and much more.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to host game nights, connect with our community, and create meaningful growth towards Castle of Blackwater.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Team Blackwater