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.