Greetings, Captain!
We're here with you a special Developer's Diary as it is the first year anniversary of Boat Crew since its debut in Early Access! Looking back our initial diaries, we can tell a great deal has changed and we've come quite far. Our initial planning didn't pan out, but we've been steadily working on fulfilling our goals for over the year. As the checklist grows ever shorter, let's talk about what has happened recently, and what you can look forward in the next big Early Access update!
The first big thing is our new onboarding screen, where you recruit and assemble a crew! This will be the first thing you see when you load into a Campaign, and it is the screen you will use to manage crew on a given boat. The usual crew recruitment panel will stay, and the boat screen will be where you assign reserve crew to their boats. Information about the selected crewman as well as an overview of everyone else is provided.
The second big thing, as you might have noticed in the previous picture, are crew traits! Crewmen will have certain traits; qualities to them that are a part of their background or nature and can't be changed throughout their experience on the front. Some traits will be positive; others negative, and there's no guarantee of a fair distribution. Some men will thrive in war, while others are simply not meant for it. The degree to which you can hand pick your men will increase as your successes pile on and your clout increases; in the beginning, you might have to make do with what you get whereas in the late game, you will be able to command a group of the finest the Mosquito Fleet has to offer. We hope this addition will further add to the crew management aspect of the game, and offer interesting possibilities for modders as well.
Traits aren't meant to shoehorn men into certain roles, but can be slightly helpful or slightly detrimental in particular to certain roles every now and then. However, they are not meant to ever cause problems that cannot be overcome through grit and training.
Oh, and the crew information cards are now a little more colorful with the addition of the trait icons!
Finally, the support power assignment screen is quite similar to the crew assignment screen, and provides a fast and intuitive way of buying support powers with your Requisition Points; which will form the basis of our actual economy and are a topic for the next Developer's Diary, so stay tuned! It's been a while since we dropped any hints for the next diary in a Developer's Diary, hasn't it?
That's all for now,
Go get them, Captain!
T.T.