Feral Blue update for 13 February 2020

As you may have guessed (judging by the current Steam review score), the launch of Feral Blue wasn't a jaunt via calm waters for us. Needless to say there is no such thing as Early Access: players always expect a fully finished game. "Early access" here means that in the future the game will only be made better and bigger. A little bit unfair, perhaps, but there's no point in complaining. For a small indie teams like ours this is a serious challenge - and we need to respond.

We follow all comments carefully. We have read all the negative reviews (and positive ones too, thank you for them!) and took them into account. Today we are releasing an update that will change a lot of things in the game. We hope that we can continue to pull the project into a bright future.

So, there are the things we are bringing today.

Gameplay

• Now almost every type of ship has its own economic (or military) specialization: there are heavy armored ships, extremely maneuverable ships, desalination ships, and so on
• The speed of movement on the map now depends on the number and quality of personnel assigned to the engines
• Now you need qualified personnel to keep your gun deck in service. If there are not enough crew members or they are not really skillful, your artillery might be at a risk of destruction
• The number of warriors and freemen affects the reloading time during a battle
• Added the influence of personnel on the ship's performance: maximum speed for rowing vessels, acceleration for steam vessels, and turnability for sailing vessels

Interface

• Cabin management interface has been reworked
• Added new information and pointer to the sea battle GUI
• Updated trading interface
• Updated a victory screen in battle - now players can see a list of cabins of the captured ship.

Bugfixes and optimization

• Fixed the black fog of war effect when loading a save
• Hit-boxes for sails have been expanded
• Fixed a possible self-shoot case with ballistas (if placed as a bow gun)
• Fixed a bug in trading with cities
• Freemen now go to sleep in the correct cabins
• Draw distance has been optimized for every locations.

UX

• Added protection against incorrect clicks in dialogs
• On land levels added sounds of the environment and different sounds of steps depending on the type of landscape
• Sounds in interfaces are not that annoying now.