Sep 6, 2019
UBOAT - U_Korvettenkapitaen
Hello Sailors!
As promised, here comes our roadmap and our plans overview for the Early Access period. We will be updating the graphic below each quarter or so and we'll try our best to keep you up to date.
(Please right click on the image and select "Open image in a new tab" to see it in the full size.)
Please note that the feature list visible on the roadmap is not exhaustive and focuses on large tasks that may affect gameplay in impactful ways.
Let's discuss planned work in detail.
Missions
We see our current sandbox and mission system as a good base for new content. Unexpected events tend to happen, and each assignment, despite similar goals, can turn out differently each time. Having said that, we're going to make some changes soon.First, we want to start with some groundwork and rework assignment briefing. We want to add more flair to it and make all objectives visible on the map during selection. In the current version, it's often hard to tell, for example, where is the sector that needs to be visited without closing the interface first and checking that on the map manually.
To battle the repetitiveness we want to add more variation to existing missions, by providing additional, clearly described conditions to them. Your ship may be fitted with experimental gear for the mission, storms might be expected in the target area or maybe a journalist will join your crew. These are some examples of things that may be enriching assignments soon.
We also feel that assignments need to be a bit more rewarding and offer additional challenges. We modeled 17 historical medals from various sources. We are going to use them soon by awarding them to the player and officers for completing multiple challenges during the assignment.
After the groundwork is done, we will start adding more content to existing missions and add completely new ones. We will also resume work on a campaign that will span through the whole World War II.
Sandbox
We plan to add a configuration screen soon. There, each player will have the possibility to choose the starting year, exact U-Boat to be roleplayed and the starting crew.We are already taking steps to add new units to the game. You can expect to see completely new ships types like oil tankers, enemy submarines and German surface ships along with more variety among the existing unit types.
We're also working on replacing our current tutorial with contextual hints, explanations and adding training missions in the game world.
And last, but not least, we'll add submarine pens to the game world that will be buildable in HQ. They will look like the one in the main menu.
Enhanced crew management
Crew management is going to see some changes. There is going to be a new screen where the player will be able to define various rules for the crew.It's going to be possible to start rationing the food, order a sailor to be always ready to flood the tanks or define if the idle crew should run to the bow compartment during a crash dive.
These rules will require spending management points that will be provided to you by experienced officers who will be overseeing their implementation in life. It will simulate the effect of your crew gaining experience and working well with each other as time goes on. It will also add some automation but in a balanced way.
At the later stages of Early Access, we will be adding more crew events on board, as well as more interactions with objects in the world. It's going to be possible to take aircraft crew as captives on board or rescue survivors from a sunk ship, although that will be banned in 1942 after Laconia incident.
Modding tools
With each update, we did some small steps to add full modding capabilities to the game. We consider them now to be in pretty good shape and we'll start releasing our modding tools and guides soon. They will come with Steam Workshop support.Although we declared this in Q4, it may start slowly rolling this month.
Remaining technical issues
Technical issues will remain our top priority.We already solved a great deal of them by version B124, but we will continue our commitment to solve them in the future.
Communication & bug reporting
The most effective way to report bugs to us is to use the in-game bug reporting tool that, by default, is assigned to the F11 key. This tool sends us useful diagnostic data that helps to prepare proper fixes.For general suggestion and discussion about further development, we invite everybody to visit the latest pinned topic about unstable version testing. We make a new topic with each version.
Today we are going to mark our old forum for bug reporting as deprecated. We removed the link to it from the main menu of the game a few versions back and posting on that forum will be disabled.
Yours,
Deep Water Studio
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