Keelblade

Description

Sail across a fantasy world in your own pirate ship. Master souls-like combat and powerful magic to hunt deadly bosses. Discover new islands and loot them for hidden treasures to craft upgrades for both you and your ship. (1-6 Players)

History

Beginning

An animator, game designer, and artist trio at Digital Confectioners started prototyping a co-op fantasy RPG in 2021. By July 2022 they had achieved the first goal of making a fun prototype with the right feel for the melee + abilities base combat. As soon as there was a solid base to work with, they took on the challenge of making best in class co-op gameplay. They wanted to solve the main issues with contemporary games: making a truly seamless, untethered experience with shared progression from start to finish. By early 2023 prototype builds proved they could build the vision, and the game moved into full production.

Production

Becoming known as Triarchy in 2023, 'holy trinity' inspired soft roles started to appear in the co-op gameplay. The co-op-first focus meant that many things previously taken for granted with single-player (shared quest progression? Untethered combat?) had to be iterated on significantly to find elegant solutions. The world had to be restructured several times, and the core combat received a lot of focus to get the feel to the very high bar players expect. By February 2025, a release target was set, and the team aimed to complete the initial Whirlpool Island section of the game for release via Early Access.

Through 2025, we merged two internal project teams within the studio, building towards a combined vision. The gameplay expanded to include ship sailing, crafting, and building, with survival gameplay elements mixing around the strong combat core. The world splintered into islands. This kept what the team loved: the core combat, abilities, enemies, bosses and overall world building, while expanding possibilities. The ship pulled together all the other elements of the game with a movable base to sail together with your friends.

December 2025 saw the first of many monthly public Alpha playtests. With so many possibilities within the game, the feedback from these playtests was invaluable for prioritizing where to work. Through 2026 we built alongside our fledgling community, adding naval combat, base building, cooking, increasing the maximum player count and of course a lot of new islands and bosses.

Keelblade

The rebrand to Keelblade solidified the fusion of the games' nautical elements, with the core soulslike combat.

October 2026 marks our Next Fest demo. There is still so much we want to add and improve. So now we need the game in the hands of more players. We hope you can join us and forge your own pirate legend. And just maybe, you will one day be worthy of being called a Keelblade.

Team & Repeating Collaborators

Digital Confectioners

James Tan
Studio Director

Sam Evans
Studio Director

Neil Reynolds
Project Lead

Kenneth Churcher
Gameplay and UI Development

David Hill
Art Lead

Moni Masina
Animation Lead

James McKellow
Production

Hari Kilgour
3D Art

Sean Ryan
Gameplay Development

Joseph O'Donnell
QA

Carl de Visser
Design

Carl Aiken
Mapping

Will Scott
Localization / Marketing

Thaddaeus Ho
Animation

Bryce Haywood
Gameplay Development

Sound

Paul Fox
Audio Director / Supervising Sound Designer

Finn Mitchell-Anyon
Sound Design / Implementation / Audio Programming

Sam Dixon
Additional Sound Design

Stephanie Engelbrecht
Additional Sound Design

Ora Simpson
Additional Sound Design

Keegan Meiring
Additional Sound Design

Bryan Toumu'a
Additional Sound Design

Abigail Turner
Voice Acting

Daniel Denova
Voice Acting

Paul Fox
Voice Acting

Adam Bow
Music Composition

Benjamin Squires
Trailer Composition

VFX

Nicholas Chambers
VFX Director

Leroy Noel
VFX Artist

Olivier Hasselle
Senior Technical VFX Artist

Teekatas Jeerungsuwan
VFX

Also

Assel Kozyreva
Character Art

Mikhail Kozyrev
3D Art

Michael Simpson
QA and map fixes

Nima Dadar
Testing

Felicity Meade
Graphic Design

Jinlin Jiang
Testing

John Barrett
Network Programming

Scott Bloomer
Web Design

Shannon Holmes
Web Development

Annuo Zhao
Animation

Emmy Hucker
Marketing

Alessandra Fonseca
Icon Art

Gareth Keenan
Concept Art

Contact

Media Inquiries
keelbladepress@digitalconfectioners.com

Customer Support
keelblade@digitalconfectioners.com

Web
playkeelblade.com