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.