Developer's Diary - 10th of October - "5th Checkpoint"
Greetings, Captain! It's been 10 weeks since Boat Crew began its Early Access journey, and as the seas are wont to cause, she's had some rough patches but came out alright! Today's Developer's Diary will be talking about what happened in the last two weeks. We'll go over the Leviathan/Akizuki update that was originally meant to be released sooner, part of the Campaign map, and our decision to re-boot the Developer's Diary series, starting with another diary next week! That's the short of it; now let's dive into the long version!
Current Situation:
First thing to notice, as you might have, is that the Legacy Roadmap is no longer here. We're currently re-organizing the previous Roadmap into the First Galactic Empire a version-based checkpoint system instead of time-based checkpoint system. What that means is that while we want to keep up bi-weekly updates, we learned through the hard way that we shouldn't commit to a rigid two-week constraint for each specific goal. Below is the new burning animation for Fubuki, no allusion intended to the ultimate fate of our original goal of sticking to rigid timetables.
Milestones take different amounts of time in a way that is hard to estimate beforehand; trying to implement something often brings up many technical or design questions about it that we hadn't previously thought of in abstract, Sometimes, it's simply that we run into a problem that we underestimated that ends up taking a lot more time to resolve than previously envisioned and in all honesty, sometimes it turns out we had an overly optimistic opinion of our own productivity.
Either way, game development has refused to be caged and split neatly into two week chunks, and has not so gently discouraged us from trying to do that any further. As we've talked about in the previous diary, we can't really justify sticking to the old Legacy Roadmap anymore, so we will be re-organizing each goal to versions, providing an order to development without committing to a time scale that may turn out to be unrealizable. As said earlier, bi-weekly diaries will continue, and in fact we intend to re-boot the series next week, focusing on the Campaign specifically and presenting the new and improved version-based Roadmap.
Speaking of the Campaign, here's a teaser; a part of the currently finished Campaign map, which has been redrawn in much higher quality compared to the Campaign Spectator live version. Can you tell which one of the Solomon Islands this is?
The next diary, which, again, will be next week instead of two weeks later, will be entirely focused on the Campaign, so further details on the Campaign are sparse for now. Instead we have word from our original playable mode, Challenges. Leviathan, the debut mission of the Akizuki-Class Destroyer, which is now also available on Fleet Endurance as an enemy, is now available as a 3 star Challenge.
Our original intention was to release this mission within the week of showing the finished versions of Dauntless and Akizuki, but the AI interaction of the mission provided to be a unique challenge to get right. The mission requires you to rely on your friendly Dauntless bombers to actually sink the Akizuki as you do not have anything that can hurt it meaningfully and the Liberty Ship you're supposed to screen for is woefully outgunned.
Of course, the latter actually was not true for a long while as we realized the Liberty Ship could often sink the mighty and fearsome Akizuki in a rather embarrassing fashion as we realized its weapons overperformed dramatically while the Akizuki did not receive its health multiplier as intended. Between those balancing issues, balancing Akizuki's perception of the player's threat so you could actually reliably draw fire without going in so close that you would be dead before you realized the aggro switched on you, and taking the Liberty Ship from an unsinkable beast that can solo one of IJN's finest Destroyers to the cheaply made cargo ship with just enough defense to deter light targets, it took us 9 internal versions of the Developer's Kit before we felt Leviathan was balanced and fun enough to see the light of day. What started out as a mission concept meant to teach the player to respect and fear Destroyers and practice evasive action turned into a grand experiment on AI vs AI interactions, and we're happy to say that Dauntless dive bombers are now good at dive bombing, Akizuki-Class Destroyers are good at destroying and Liberty Ship is good at sinking without an even more disposable asset around (you) to take fire in its place. Everything is where it should be.
Make sure to check Leviathan, as well as the rest of the challenges out if you haven't already! Challenges range from being easy enough to be a continuation of the Tutorial to setpiece battles where you face some serious opposition, and are a taste of what's to expect from Campaign's Special Missions in the future. Also, even if the Campaign will be our main focus, Challenges still offer a rich array of scenarios and will continuously be iterated on, so, again, if you haven't tried them out, take them for a spin!
Finally, you may have noticed faint black smoke popping up in the gif of Akizuki being dive-bombed; that there is our new addition of flak to Japanese AAA. Now, of course we realize that "flak" is just the German abbreviation meaning anti-aircraft artillery, but it has made its way into English and our hearts as black puffs of lethal smoke ubiquitous in movies and games about WWII. It's a variable timed fuse, low damage shell with a large area of effect that is currently fired 25% of the time from anything with Type 96 25mm guns, which is a quite common weapon in the Japanese arsenal.
We hope that this will make for a more colorful and familiar sight while also adding a refreshing feeling to the game. For you, it's not a great threat even if not exactly great for your health, but it does do a number on your allied aircraft.
Closing Remarks:
As we are re-organizing the Roadmap, it wouldn't make much sense to have a Goals for the Next Cycle section, and so that concludes this cycle's Developer's Diary. Come back next week when we present the new Roadmap and focus on the Campaign, and for now, take care and enjoy the new Challenge!
Good hunting, Captain! T.T.
v1.3.2.5 Stable | Leviathan
v1.3.2.5 Stable | Leviathan
Gameplay & UI
- Added Enemy Flak. - Added Akizuki Destroyer. - Reworked Liberty Ship. - Fixed and rebalanced and some unit hitpoints. - Nerfed AT gun damage. - Added UI notice for half crewed weapons. - Control hints for related weapons in boat customization. - Localization support for Fleet Endurance.
Visuals
- Tidied up existing VFX. - New flame effects. - Fog color handled for all times of day, to fix the blue tint on terrain like the one in Free Fire Zone.
Bug Fixes
- Displacing objects on pause. - Ocean foam line glitch on terrain object edges. - Minesweeper collider not functional. - Captain sometimes leaves the helm for a brief stroll, attempted fix. - Jittery trajectory circles. - Corrupt dynamic deck navigation on Higgins 78'. - Irrelevant screen shakes from distant objects.
Developer's Diary - 26th of September - 4th Checkpoint
Greetings, Captain! It's been two months since Boat Crew was released on Early Access; time sure flies! As we discussed in the previous checkpoint, we've had some setbacks, so we figure it's time for a particularly big Developer's Diary to both discuss what we intend to be in the initial release of the Campaign and to also show you that development is still proceeding at flank speed. Now let's get to where we are now!
Roadmap:
1st of August - Early Access Launch
- Tutorial and 15 Challenges to play though - Complete Combat Mechanics - Campaign Tech Preview as a Spectator Mode
- Final retouches - Preparation for Release - Early Access Reward
Bonus - Post Release Modding Tools
Current Situation:
First of all, the Akizuki-Class Destroyer we've talked about in the previous diary will reach the front in an update due soon. Rougher and tougher than her older sister, the Fubuki, the Akizuki will boast a greater rate of fire on top of better durability. If you thought the Fubuki was too easy a target, you're in luck, as the Akizuki will be available as an opponent in Fleet Endurance, in the upcoming Campaign, as well as in the new challenge, Leviathan, where you will take a lightly armed PT boat, dodging furious salvos from the Akizuki while neutralizing her escorts so the cavalry may be brought in.
The iconic SBD-3 Dauntless is also making its way to Boat Crew, where it will initially be available as a scripted ally that shows up in certain missions. Make no mistake; we are well aware of the historical significance as well as the effectiveness of this little firebrand, and it will be available in its full glory as a customizable call-in aircraft in the Campaign eventually. For now, though, you will have to make do with its deadly and accurate bombs and a decent turret that gives it at least some self-defense. Given that it will be the first dive bomber in the game, we expect that it will be a good test bed for dive bomber mechanics, so expect tweaks on that front until we reach the level of maximally satisfying diving attacks.
Campaign Discussion:
Now to the main act, let's talk about the Campaign! In this section, we'll go over what we hope to achieve for the initial release of the Campaign in exhaustive detail. Note that this list is only what we intend to have at first for the Campaign, and considering the rest of the Early Access will be mostly dedicated to the Campaign, you can expect a lot more development forthcoming than we are ready to discuss just now. We do tend to blab about things ahead of schedule in our Discord channel though.
Now let's get down to it!
Design Philosophy and Basic Mechanics:
First of all, it's useful to acknowledge that Boat Crew is a small-scale game. You're not playing as a 5-star admiral in charge of all forces in the Pacific, you're not playing as a Commodore in charge of a flotilla of cruisers and escort carriers; you're not even playing as the Captain of a Destroyer! You're here to be the Captain of a PT Boat at first, before moving on to leading larger and greater numbers of squadrons as you prove yourself. Which is an important job, for sure, but also limited in scope.
To reinforce that we're making a conscious decision to keep the scope limited, This is not to say that you'll have no impact on the campaign; on the contrary, we'll be trying to structure the campaign in such a way that your impact is through direct action. Your concerns will be mainly tactical, and the Campaign will have a "flow of things", so to speak, that you will affect but ultimately cannot fully control. We hope that this will create reactive situations and avoid the typical grand campaign pitfall of having the player be unstoppable and constantly on the offensive. Our goal is to create a system where setbacks are natural and expected, and do not make the player feel like they must have been at fault because they happened.
With that said, let's move on to more specific aspects of our design. The way time progression is handled is characteristic of any grand campaign, and so it's a good place to start the discussion.
Time System
As we said, we want to create a campaign where small scale action makes a difference and most considerations are of the tactical nature, and so, we're going for a continuous time system instead of a turn based system. Every hour will count when it comes to your maneuvering.
You'll be able to speed up movement in the map-movement display but there'll be no instantaneous travel; every maneuver has a time and therefore, opportunity cost, and things will happen whether you are there or not.
Resource System:
The currency in the front are Requisition Points (RPs), which you will use to recruit crewmen, buy hulls and equipment, refill your stocks; the works. RP windfalls are gained through some dynamic missions, special missions, bounties, capturing enemy bases and by relinquishing command of obsolescent squadrons or redundant crewmen.
Your constant trickle of RPs will come from your Territories; bases in Territories will organically build up over time and allocate resources to your squadrons. At first, you'll have very little influence over base progression and kickbacks will accordingly be small; as you grow in rank, you'll be able to do more in hastening their development and get a larger kickback from them as well.
As the Captain, your fame and experience will directly affect your income of RPs; meaning as the forces under your command grow, an experienced commander will matter more and more and will have to be kept safe accordingly.
Supply System:
Supply flows for both sides from outside the Campaign bounds, to simulate the existence of, well, an ongoing war between two industrialized powers outside the bounds of the Solomons Campaign. Then, supply will flow between bases in automated paths to maximize the total Supply Balance.
Distance travelled reduces the value of transferred supply to simulate the cost of the resources expended in longer routes in terms of more fuel, more tonnage time and more escorts, while each base will give a supply chain bonus to supply that it passes on and in turn receive a downstream kickback to help development progress in that base. This achieves two things. First, it encourages a tightly wowen pack of bases that will help eachother build up faster and give the player and allied squadrons an easier time defending supplies. Second, it means that the fastest build-up will be on the frontline bases as they will typically be at the end of the longest chains.
Note that this also applies to the enemy's own supply situation, encouraging deep strikes into the enemy supply. The earlier you catch a supply ship in the supply chain, the more damage you do, as you'll have sunk supply that would have gone through several other bases, gaining a bonus each time. Accordingly, such deep strikes will be harder as you'll have to slip by or fight several enemy patrols and make it back, all without the benefit of your own supply and reinforcement options, so committing squadrons to such high risk and high reward missions will be an option we think can be quite fun to have.
Supply routes won't be directly affected by the player, but you'll be able to mark routes as high risk zones to discourage the automation from picking those routes.
Patrols and Assaults
Each base will routinely burn off resources to deploy patrols, which will patrol nearby regions to scout and escort supply ships. When enough patrols have been assembled, the base commander AI for a given base may judge its time to call for an assault to an adjacent base depending on its strength and scouting status. In the build-up for an assault, nearby regions will be stripped of resources and assault Task Force will be formed. This build-up will be represented in patrols from nearby bases moving over, and more supply being transferred to the assaulting and defending bases.
A Task Force has a limited amount of time of high intensity build-up before it must reach a target strength, otherwise the offensive will not commence. Meaning you'll be able to disrupt an assault before it happens by intercepting units and defeating them in detail before it ever happens. Assuming that doesn't happen, the Task Force will move towards the target base, and assuming it is successful in the ensuing battle, will take over the target base. The Task Force will then be disassembled into its constituent patrol groups and start patrolling around the newly acquired base.
An assault is an expensive, involved affair, but you as the Captain will not be completely out of the loop when it comes to making the major decisions. As said before, you can change the fate of an Assault by attacking and destroying the enemy in detail or keeping the enemy from doing the same to your allies, but you can also encourage Assaults and have a say in when and how they will be performed after you've proven yourself a little.
The Map
Part of the allure of a grand campaign is that the tactical map where you actually have engagements on is a part of the greater strategic map, and so can help immerse you in the greater context of your small-scale actions. Our original intention was to dynamically generate a 25 x 25 km cut, centered around where the engagement is happening, and put the player in it on the go. This sort of dynamic map generation would have been quite interesting, but as we looked into it, we came to realize that this would result in rather long load times and take away from the pacing of the game.
We figured a good trade-off between using cuts of the strategic map and having reasonable load times was to pre-make several maps that are each cuts of the campaign map and load the engagements to them accordingly. That said, this implementation is not without flaws either, as we're currently looking into finding solutions to problems like having infinitely long and arbitrarily detailed coastlines, both of which are currently incompatible with our current map generation system, as well as the loss of granularity when an engagement happens to happen too close to the boundary between two such pre-made segments.
This is an ongoing cause of development for us, and we expect to reach a satisfying solution one way or the other before Early Access is over, but Campaign Alpha is likely to release with a series of maps that approximate segments of the campaign map but aren't exactly them. It's an ongoing design concern without an obvious solution.
Experience
Experience is the difference between a fresh recruit and a seasoned sailor, and will have a major impact on crew member effectiveness and competence in Boat Crew. Typically, experience will be obtained through combat and performing related actions; Leadership experience will be obtained through commanding the boat, Gunnery experience will be obtained through, well, gunning, and Loading experience will be obtained through; you guessed it, loading.
That much is not a very groundbreaking concept, people will get better at things they do on a regular basis and this will also be the case for Boat Crew. Where we feel we make an interesting distinction is that experience will be transmissible; any crew member with experience below the mean experience of the group will get a trickle of experience over time. Hanging out with experienced loaders and helping out on occasion will teach you a thing or two. If you are constantly on ride or die missions with possibly the best Corpsman in the Navy, you can bet you'll have an idea on how to use a tourniquet. It's not going to make you an expert on its own, but experience will be gained through association with experienced crew members.
The design goal for this feature is to encourage players to make training boats and disseminate the experience, and avoid the temptation of making an all-star team of crack sailors when it's not necessary for a crucial mission. We hope this will encourage moving crew around and thus expand on the crew management aspect we're going for.
Experience will give sizable passive bonuses for the immediate future, but later on, we intend to add active abilities to further boost the significance of experience.
Goals for the Next Cycle:
Right now, we have a lot on our plate as outlined above, and due to the setbacks of the previous weeks, the line between cycles have been blurred. Even though the pacing situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage, development is ramping back up to maximum speed and the Campaign Alpha should accordingly be sooner rather than later. In short, our goals for the next cycle is to have implemented what we talked about so far.
The full Squadron System, Tech Progression, Upgrades, Customizable Call-Ins etc. will not make it to the initial Campaign release, and we are not quite ready to talk about them in detail yet, but we hope that we'll be able to talk about them by the time of the next diary!
Closing Remarks:
Currently, you may have noticed that our Roadmap is desychronized with what we are actually talking about in our Developer's Diaries, which is a result of our previous couple weeks of setbacks as we've discussed before. We're leaving the Roadmap up as it is for posterity as we did not want to pretend we never had those goals to begin with, and also because we still fully intend to do everything we promised in the Roadmap and more, even if the time scale may end up being longer than we initially envisioned. We hope for and appreciate your understanding in the matter and remain committed to making Boat Crew the best it can be.
That's all for now, Captain! T.T.
v1.3.2.4 Stable | Optimization and Fixes
v1.3.2.4 Stable
Gameplay
- Decreased Fleet Endurance Fletcher cost. - Bow height now adjusts appropriately according to speed.
Bug Fixes
- Challenge score screen too bright after auto-exposure implementation. - Fleet Endurance budget calculation issues, there was an exploit. - Fixed mini-map rendering issue causing some islands to be invisible, i.e. in Free Fire Zone. Overlapping terrain chunks are now safely rendered.
Optimization
- Ocean and foliage geometry optimized and reduced up to 50% for some scenes. - CPU side optimization for mass rendering of objects.
Developer's Diary - 12th of September - A Temporary Setback
Greetings, Captain!
It's been six weeks since we've released Boat Crew on Early Access and we've been hard at work bringing more and more of our vision into life. So hard, in fact, that our Lead Developer Cotanius has shown signs of developing cubital tunnel syndrome. We've also found out that the overall overexertion since release has hurt our productivity for the time being. As a result of both mental fatigue and outright physical injury, we've had to scale back our development goals for the week.
Campaign work has been progressing, if slowly. We've mostly focused on the campaign AI as it tended to cluster units and fail to organize attacks into the last bastion during testing. The original conception of the Campaign AI hasn't met our standards as a result, and is currently being reworked to give the strategic map a more organic, less insect-like flow. We will go into detail about this in the next full Developer's Diary.
We've updated the strategic view with a much higher quality map, part of which you can see here. The much greater amount of detail should be more pleasing to the eye:
The precise drawing was done by a commission, and is admittedly better than what we ourselves can do without taking up too much development time from our other priorities. Combined with our post-effects, we feel it's quite an improvement on the map we currently have displayed in Campaign Spectator.
We want you to know, by showing you a concrete example, that your contribution in Early Access is directly helping the development of the game! In the future, more aspects of the game that would benefit from high domain-specific skill might be added or improved by commissioning the help of people who specialize in them.
We also have a new aquatic horror to introduce: The Akizuki-Class Destroyer!
We had a feeling you might have found the Fubuki to be a wimp, so we're introducing a more modern Destroyer with higher displacement. This tough customer has more and deadlier guns, and will have devastating salvos that are not nearly as easy to dodge as those on the Fubuki. In addition, their secondary armament will be even stronger. The weaknesses will be for you to figure out when this killer is let loose on the seas, most likely assuming the role of a Destroyer Leader.
Overall, we are sorry for the delay but we hope that you understand our reasons. We remain fully committed to the project and will be resuming full-sized development diaries in the next cycle.
That will be all for now.
Fair winds, Captain! T.T.
v1.3.2.3 Stable | PC-461 Available in Fleet Endurance
v1.3.2.3 Stable
Gameplay
- PC-461 & Fletcher available in Fleet Endurance game mode - Added control/accessibility option to allow call-ins in targeting mode.
Bug Fixes
- Removed portrait requirement for load finish. Sometimes crew isn't rendered properly into their portraits, this may have been causing blackscreen issues with some users. The portrait creation will be retouched later. - Fixed a couple minor lighting issues. - Collision avoidance and terrain push assist adjustments/optimizations. - Fixed being able to control boat with no captain, caused by losing captain to the water while submerged.
Known Issues - Scenes can sometimes get stuck with "Complete Tasks" objective when a level is loaded in longer play sessions, kindly restart the game. - You can roleplay as a flying object or a sub if you pause and Alt+Tab for a few minutes. - Connected gamepads and joysticks cause problems since they are still being experimented with. If you are going for a smooth experience, please disconnect them before booting the game.
Developer's Diary - 29th of August - 2nd Checkpoint
Greetings, Captain! It's been a month since Boat Crew was released on Early Access, and with the Campaign's Alpha release drawing ever closer, we have a Developer's Diary for you that is the calm before the storm. As such, it will be of the short and sweet variety. Now let's talk about what happened in these last two weeks, and we are planning for the next two!
Roadmap:
1st of August - Early Access Launch
- Tutorial and 15 Challenges to play though - Complete Combat Mechanics - Campaign Tech Preview as a Spectator Mode
- Final retouches - Preparation for Release - Early Access Reward
Bonus - Post Release Modding Tools
Current Situation:
First of all, Boat Crew got an uptick in attention recently, and our Game Hub membership grew to 500 people! That includes people who are already in Early Access, as well as those who are following the game to see how it develops, but either way, we're glad to have you here!
Since last week, Fleet Endurance is out on its first stable build iteration, with 3 boat hulls at your disposal to take on an ever increasing number and quality of enemies. We've added the Combat Width parameter, which determines the total score value of enemies that can spawn against you at a time, and have also tweaked the enemy Evolution behavior for better pacing. Fleet Endurance will be improved in tandem with the Campaign and the current iteration is not final, though it is, by itself, quite a complete experience. That said, Custom Difficulty as well as more customizable call-ins are planned for the future, and the economy is always open for balancing so let us know what you think.
Going by the participation rates in our Experimental branch, many of you are already acquainted with the mode, but in case you haven't tried it yet, give it a try!
We're also bringing the PC-461-Class Submarine Chaser, a rather large boat with ample armament. Meant to seek out and destroy submarines, the PC-461 is nevertheless well-equipped to deal with surface threats and will be more than a fair match for most of the enemy light surface targets you'll be facing on the Pacific Front. She is very likely to be a playable boat in the future, but for now, she will be joining the battle on your side in Fleet Endurance, pretty soon.
Goals for the Next Cycle:
The Campaign's Alpha release is our goal for the next development cycle, and it will include the initial versions of the experience system, as well as the tech system. Note that these, among the other features of the Campaign, will be greatly iterated on, an endeavor that will take us the rest of Early Access. Some critical design elements will be finalized in this period, so while it is a rather definitive part of development for Boat Crew, we can't really say too much without committing to design choices that we may later decide weren't the best. You're just going to have to wait and see in the next week's Developer's Diary!
Closing Remarks:
As we said in the preamble, this Developer's Diary was short and sweet. All the better as the next one is going to be quite a read, so hang in there and take the time to enjoy some Fleet Endurance!
Fair winds, Captain! T.T.
v1.3.2.2 Stable | Fleet Endurance Game Mode Stable
v1.3.2.2 Stable
changes since last experimental
Gameplay
- Fleet Endurance pacing adjustments. - Minor pricing adjustments. - Higgins 78' playable in Fleet Endurance. - Buffs to Mk8 type torpedo to work better on the rearward launch platform. - Shifting Shadows challenge adjustments.
Audio
- Found and fixed few corrupted audio file paths causing missing audio in builds. - Adjusted sound engine settings for other audio glitches. - More audio tweaks and filter reordering.
Bug Fixes
- Random disappearance of some weapons in game due to customization features, usually rockets. - Loading a level with a different boat during a session causes role hotkey visuals to bug out and become unresponsive if clicked on with mouse. - Crew with ammo boxes can't go into weapons because the command sends them as loaders. Changed it so they are only sent as loaders when they are already marked as loaders and the weapon can be filled. - Changing language resets and breaks some settings, most importantly resolution.
v1.3.2.1 Experimental | General Fixes & Tweaks
v1.3.2.1 Experimental | General Fixes & Tweaks
Graphics
- Fixed 60fps limit inconsistency. - Fixed Ambient Occlusion setting inconsistency. - Coral geometry heavily optimized through retopology and LODs. - Flare lighting glitch fixed. No longer brightens anything in daylight, added intensity curve according to it's lifetime. - Auto-exposure post processing added, useful for night scenes. A brightness setting may still be needed. - Weather color adjustments for auto-exposure addition. - Fixed discrete time transition at the end of "Free Fire Zone"
Audio
- Aircraft audio glitches fixed through manual filter. - Weapon shot and impact sound limit increased.
AI
- AI collision avoidance made more consistent and performance optimal.
v1.3.2.0 Experimental | Fleet Endurance Preview 1
v1.3.2.0 Experimental (Fleet Endurance Preview 1)
- First iteration of Fleet Endurance. - Basic weapon, resource, and camo customization revealed. - AI versions of two PT boats introduced. - Ki-45 introduced.
