⚓Greetings, captains!
☁️⚙️ Black Skylands is now available for purchase!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1143810/Black_Skylands/
🎞️ Watch the launch trailer:
We’re excited about the fact that this day is finally here! Our first ship has sailed on a challenging but exciting journey full of adventures. There’s still a lot of work ahead of us: we want to make the game even better—and we’ll do so with your help, friends!
We did our best to enter the early access phase with the most high-quality product possible. The build that’s currently out is drastically different from the version of the game you played this spring during our open playtesting, and even more different from last year’s demo version. Let’s talk about the major additions and changes we've made to the game.
1. Plot changes and little Eva
We decided to redo the prologue so that the player would get a better sense of the events that start off Eva’s adventures. In the prologue, the player takes on a role of an 11-year-old Eva, and gets to know the cast of characters.
2. Slow down time
You can now build a laboratory and use it to invent a way to slow down time.
3. Mod boxes
Mod boxes can only be opened at a special station on the Fathership. This is one of the things that motivates the player to keep coming coming back to their home base. That’s where you can gather resources you’ve grown, plant seeds, process ore, and open boxes with cool rewards inside.
4. Upgrades for saving population
We wanted to give you an interesting reward for saving islands. Freeing an island from invaders now increases the saved population stat. Upon saving populations, players earn useful upgrades for their ship and character.
5. Recurring island invasions
We wanted to add a mechanic that would occasionally bring the player back to islands they had already conquered. This brought us to the idea of repeating invasions on liberated locations. To keep it from being annoying, this won’t happen often, but it does flesh out the gameplay with additional objectives.
6. Herbs for medkits
You can now gather herbs for medkits. Spawn points are placed manually and have a certain chance of appearing when an island loads (for example, 30%). Herbs are gathered when you interact with them. Interacting takes the same amount of time as using a medkit. The herb disappears once it is gathered, and the player gains a medkit.
7. Limited character respawns
We got a lot of feedback about the player being essentially immortal, since Luma the moth just brings the player back to the ship when they die. We decided to add Luma energy which is used up when the player dies or the player’s ship is destroyed. To refill the energy gauge, the player has to sleep in a bed. Saving populations can increase your maximum energy.
8. The Swarm zone
This zone is very different from the rest. We wanted to create an area that would surprise the player and change the rules of the game a little. There are no fueling stations here, no day/night cycle, and the map is unavailable. The islands are randomly generated each time you load your save. This is where you will finally encounter the Swarm. Fighting these creatures is quite different from fighting, for example, Kain's Falcons. There’s no way to plan your journey to this zone, but you will need to prepare for it thoroughly.
We’d like to thank everyone who has supported us during the development process, especially those who participated in our open playtest—your feedback was incredibly helpful for us, We hope our community will stay by our side as we continue the journey forward!
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Sincerely yours,
