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
15th of August - 1st Checkpoint
- Preliminary Customization
- Fleet Endurance Mode
- Routine Unit Additions
29th of August - 2nd Checkpoint
- Customization Improvements
- Fleet Endurance Improvements
- Routine Unit Additions
12th of September - 3rd Checkpoint
- Customization Improvements
- Campaign Alpha Release
- Routine Unit Additions
26th of September - 4th Checkpoint (*)
- Crew Skills and Progression
- Tech Tree
- Routine Unit Additions
10th of October - 5th Checkpoint
- Enhanced Weather Mechanics
- Larger Boat Classes
- Campaign Map Expansion
24th of October - 6th Checkpoint
- Level Editor w/ Guide
- Routine Unit Additions
- Campaign Improvements
7th of November - Final Checkpoint
- 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.