Boat Crew: Laying the Keel - Developer's Diary G1

Feb 13, 2025

We're back to you with another Developer's Diary series after an interim update exactly a month ago. The first entry to the series is titled G1, where the G stands for us giving up on trying to keep track of our reboot count.

In the time since the quality of life update, we've kept busy, and are finally ready to announce that we are bringing to the game: The Level Editor, coming to you in the next Big Update!

The Level Editor is an evolution of our in-house Scenario Creator, which was a not-as-fancy but still quite effective tool that we used in creating the Challenges, as well as the Tutorial levels you see in the game. Although it has served us well, we felt it wasn't quite up to the polishing standards we wanted to have for a player-facing feature. Once we decided we would be spending time to polish the tool up, we figured we might as well put it into the game directly to make it more accessible to all players.

In part using the work we've already done for the Boatuary, the Level Editor provides you with a real-time 3D display of the map from the above. You are able to shape the terrain to the exact layout you have in mind, and can place units on the map with perfect feedback on what the formation might look like.

The system consists of nodes, allowing intuitive, linear scripting of missions without any knowledge of programming required whatsoever. With ease, you'll be able to spawn units, give them specific movement orders or assign them with patrol regions, set the boundaries of the map, gather units in a formation for the formation AI to take over and so on; everything you see in the Challenges will be possible, potentially also including possibilities that we have not explored before.

The editor comes with its own guide nested on the sidebar, as well as a dynamically updating legend that explains the meaning of the connection lines you're forming. In addition to these, we will also be shooting a tutorial video for our Tabbing Tabby YouTube channel, where we will be making a simple, introductory challenge along with a commentary describing the process.

Now, we'd like to stress that while we'll be doing our best to ensure getting started with the tool is as easy as possible, we are also counting on you to give the tool a shot and express your creativity in the form of Boat Crew challenges for you and others to play, and also to share tips and tricks with your fellow Captains.

Speaking from experience, modding scenes for games are always a collaborative effort; so please don't be shy when it comes to asking or answering questions about the tool, exchanging notes, tips and tricks, and also in commenting on other people's scenarios.

We're really hoping we can reach the critical mass needed there to have a lively modding scene for Boat Crew going forward. That would give us the motivation we need to further develop modding tools.

You might be wondering what's going to prevent you from setting up naval combat scenarios to your liking and to play Boat Crew as if it were a naval combat strategy game? Well, certainly not us! Enabling DevControls via the console and using the Replay Mode to swap camera view between units or have a free camera will allow you to do just that.

The Experimental Branch for the Big Update will be launched next week, bringing the initial public version of the Level Editor. We'll be on the lookout for all comments and error reports as usual, both on the community forums and on our Discord Channel.

There won't be Steam Workshop support at the initial launch, meaning files will have to be shared manually. We are planning to add it at some point during the Experimental Branch, so rest assured it will be there by the time the Big Update gains a name and reaches the Stable Branch.