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BYOBattleship is a build-your-own-warship arcade naval combat sim. Design destroyers, cruisers, and battleships from WW2-era hulls and parts, then take one into battle against hordes of enemy ships, planes, submarines, and preposterous giant superweapons. As the campaign progresses, acquire new parts to enhance your ships, and fight to defend the world against dictators who are trying to control it with a seemingly limitless supply of war machines.

(https://i.imgur.com/91KR9Opl.png)

(https://i.imgur.com/Be5BdEgl.png)

(https://i.imgur.com/X9TqHXel.png)

Download the demo! (https://toomuchabstraction.itch.io/byobattleship)

Twitter (https://twitter.com/byobattleship)
Twitch devstreams (https://www.twitch.tv/byobattleship)

Horribly out-of-date trailer:
Horribly out-of-date trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt--T1s6704)

I've been working on BYOBattleship for about a year now. All of the core mechanics and systems are implemented. What remains is a gigantic pile of content that needs to be created: missions, 3D models, writing, and things like boss AI and new weapon systems. It's difficult for me to estimate how much more time this will take.

The game is implemented in Unity, with Blender for modeling, Inkscape and Glimpse for 2D art, and Audacity for modifying sound effects. Source control is via GitHub.

I'd be delighted to answer any questions you have about the game!

I've been following this on a Discord server we're both on, and it looks like it's really coming together well! Glad to see a devlog here.

I have a question - what were your major influences for this game? Or, a slightly different question, what other games are there that play like this one? To me it seems totally original but I'm sure there is some pre-existing art...

Hey, thank you!

My primary influence, by far, is Warship Gunner 2, a Playstation 2 game. Indeed my original goal was basically to remake that game on a modern system. I highly recommend checking it out if you like the concept, because the game still holds up great today -- which isn't to say that I haven't done my best to improve on the formula of course! In particular, my ship designer has a few more factors to take into account, such as needing to include superstructure to place your radar, sonar, fire control, etc. into. And I'm trying to take my bosses even further beyond (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1264194209147322368) the ridiculousness that WG2 had.

But you're right that there aren't a whole lot of games in exactly this space that I'm aware of. That was in fact one of the reasons why I chose this game to make instead of any of the other ideas I have that are in much more well-trodden ground, like Metroidvanias or roguelikes. Most naval combat games aim for a more simulationist angle, doing their best to put you in the captain's chair and carefully modeling huge numbers of subtle effects. Combat is on the ship-vs-ship or fleet-vs-fleet scale, with relatively long engagement ranges and a slow pace. In contrast, I tend to think of my game as being more of a shoot-em-up with extensive customization options. It's really a different thing, and I'm hoping that this will enable it to stand out and have broad appeal.

I guess I should probably actually update this thread from time to time, huh? Today's big accomplishment was adding dawn and dusk time-of-day settings:

(https://i.imgur.com/Zs5GGYI.png)

(https://i.imgur.com/ZB7Kjdo.png)

They do a lot to add atmosphere and color variation compared to the usual daytime mode.

(https://i.imgur.com/WPo4qY3.png)

That flyng battleship make me dream of scifi wars. Hope it will be a permanent adition

It's the first boss; it's absolutely staying in!  ;) The main problem I have with it is that it sets a high bar for all of the other bosses, but I think I'm up to the challenge!

Making new ships and planes is something I do when I'm too tired or distractible to do anything more involved. I spent most of the day working on the game's tech tree, then hammered out this Scharnhorst-class battleship after I couldn't think straight any more.

(https://i.imgur.com/XZvXiCN.png)

Enemy ships all use historical layouts, so this guy will be facing you down in some of the later missions. And eventually you'll be able to unlock the hull, bridges, and vent stack and use them on your own ships!

I've been working on the game's tech tree, which had been pretty bare-bones. It's gotten a bit of juice now and a cleaner, more informative UI; most importantly, there's a view which just shows you all of the techs ready for purchase so you can hold down a button and buy them all (or as many as you can afford).

https://i.imgur.com/qPLYPMp.mp4

The game will have over 300 technologies by the end. While I don't expect players to spend a ton of time in this view compared to the combat and ship designer views, it's important that it works and scales well.

Screenshot Saturday tweet (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1307358280482660353)

Most of this week's efforts have been on the tech tree and the mission summary screen (which you get shown after completing a mission). It's a lot of fiddly UI work to display information to the player. I'm pretty happy with the position they're in now, but they weren't really the kind of thing to show on Screenshot Saturday, hence the above.

A new demo is out! This is version 0.03. Go check it out (https://toomuchabstraction.itch.io/byobattleship/devlog/180594/all-or-nothing-waves-of-steel-v003)!

Release notes:

Combat:
 - Two new missions have been added: Panama Canal Exit and Cuba
 - Greatly improved mission load times
 - Many new buildings and airplanes
 - Most materials now respond appropriately to changes in lighting
  - Add sunrise/sunset times of day; revamp nighttime aesthetics
 - New explosion effects
 - Completely revamped mission summary screen
 - Short-range radar shows terrain
 - Add environmental sound effects for when enemy projectiles nearly hit the player
 - Revamp many sound effects
 - Player ship gets smudged and smoky as it gets damaged
 - Greatly improve AI navigation capabilities
 - Torpedoes fire in spreads instead of ripple-firing
 - Guns are much better at retaining a lock on their targets
 - Panama Canal mission is less cramped
 - Add LODs to everything to reduce rendered poly count
 - Numerous performance improvements
 - Water churn effects (from ship wakes, torpedoes, etc.) are nicer
 - Better muzzle flash effects
 - Reduce obvious tiling of terrain textures
 - Ocean is prettier
 - Maximum firing range is limited by the weather and the ship's installed radar systems.

Ship Designer:
 - New customization options: decals and paint jobs! You can have a purple tiger-striped ship with a shark mouth on the front if you like. Let me know if there's decals or paint patterns that you want to see in the game!
 - Many new ships, parts, and flags added
 - Most parts have had their stats tweaked
 - Add "special" devices that can be activated during combat.
  - Add two specials: engine booster and dodge module
 - Add diminishing returns to ship power to prevent ludicrously fast ships being easily built
 - Hull and bridge part menus split entries out by tier, to avoid having one huge menu
 - Tech tree has been completely revamped
 - Greatly improved performance of firing angle calculations
 - Add a "PD Command" stat which governs the effectiveness of point-defense weapons

General UI:
 - The mouse can be used to navigate the UI
 - UI navigation is a lot less twitchy
 - Lots and lots of bugfixes
 - Improve the tactical maps a bit
 - Better indication of which option in a menu is currently highlighted

Hot on the heels of yesterday's release, a new patch (https://toomuchabstraction.itch.io/byobattleship/devlog/180769/all-or-nothing-waves-of-steel-003a)!

Release notes for v0.03a:
 - Fix the ship designer not being functional. Mea culpa!
 - Fix keyboard users being unable to put the ship into reverse or indeed even slow down.
 - Fix the player being unable to interact with waypoints (e.g. the docks in "Galapagos Raid") if their framerate was too high.

I'm looking to pay a musician to compose music for my game! Here's the job description (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MSMoNwX63jncCh07e7VEqQ86N--Wh4Oef5CkF6XD1Mw/edit?usp=sharing). If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out!

The last couple of weeks have mostly been spent on polish, clearing up issues revealed by playtesters of the demo. You can see some tweaks to the HUD in this video. The short-range radar / speed / health indicator is smaller and has been moved to below the long-range radar. Armor now just gives bonus health instead of having a semi-complicated penetration system. Enemies pop up big "?" above them when they lose their flagships, to help indicate that they've been temporarily confused. And there's a bunch of other less-visible tweaks.

https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1312400342542282752 (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1312400342542282752)

Have some playful orcas (https://i.imgur.com/31rSCxT.mp4)

Is there any way to embed videos into posts on this forum?

Today's Screenshot Saturday (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1317522500360654848) is more orcas plus seagulls.

This week has otherwise mostly been spent on polishing up the ship designer and making it more newbie-friendly. I have a ways to go but it's already substantially improved.

This looks really cool.

How do the controls for aiming / firing work? It's hard to tell from the video. There seems to be a target reticle on some of the enemy ship, is it auto-aiming your guns at that target?

Thank you!

Yeah, it's all auto-aim. Ballistic trajectory calculations are hard, so I don't expect the player to aim manually! When you point the camera at ships, a blue circle will appear over one of them, and your guns will auto-track that ship. You can lock the target to that ship so your guns will shoot it even when you're not looking at it, or alternately cycle through adjacent targets to shoot something else.

I spent most of this week working on UI for the pause screen (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1319433758248816642). Nothing super exciting, but I'm reasonably happy with where that is now.

A couple of sci-fi weapons for Screenshot Saturday (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1320040763128836096)

I've hired an artist to provide portrait art for the characters. Here's Captain Quinn, the captain of the player's ship:

(https://i.imgur.com/bj8veiq.png)

Dedicated to, obsessed with the art of naval warfare and the pursuit of their career. The upcoming conflict will push their skills to the limit, and perhaps teach them that nobody can be wholly self-reliant.

Long time no see! I'm working on getting the Steam page up and running, and part of that involves collecting screenshots. Here's some of the top contenders:

(https://i.imgur.com/hlitR9pl.png)

(https://i.imgur.com/0SNYj1cl.jpeg)

(https://i.imgur.com/V3nIa39l.jpeg)

(https://i.imgur.com/Llex6EOl.jpeg)

(https://i.imgur.com/3AUxCYHl.jpeg)

(https://i.imgur.com/jKdSyqNl.png)

(https://i.imgur.com/lgxpBk4l.png)

The logo is finalized!

(https://i.imgur.com/xS11cSll.png)

I'm quite happy with it. And with that, I have the next draft of the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6SnSlcgwC0&feature=youtu.be

There's still a few things that need fixing, most notably the visible cursor, but I think this is quite close.

Very retro, I like it

Thank you! The game I'm using as my primary reference was a PS2 game, so retro seemed appropriate (feels weird to refer to the PS2 as "retro", mind you...). Keeping things low-poly and untextured also cuts way down on my art requirements, which is pretty important considering how much stuff the game has in it.

The Steam page for Waves of Steel is LIVE! Wishlist the game! (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1482750/All_Or_Nothing_Waves_of_Steel/) Watch the new trailer! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkDeqInhIws)

Spread the word on Twitter! (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1347951068529872896) Your help is greatly appreciated!

A poll for you all: how important do you think it is that a game support multiple save files?

One of my favorite tracks that Mikel Dale, the team's musician, has put together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ThDho4W9M (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ThDho4W9M)

This plays during mission briefings, when much of the game's story is relayed to the player. I love the atmosphere it creates.

I put out a new demo (https://toomuchabstraction.itch.io/byobattleship) of the game!

Change log:

 - Changed location of save data; on Windows, old save data is at
   C:/Users/yourusername/AppData/LocalLow/TMAGames/BYOBattleship
   New data is at
   C:/Users/yourusername/AppData/LocalLow/TMAGames/Waves of Steel
   and should be backwards-compatible with your old saves.
 - Add title screen fanfare
 - Increased speed of ships and ranges of weapons, radar, and sonar.
 - Add a visualization of weapon firing arcs during combat
 - Torpedoes have a wider firing arc.
 - Hopefully fix a bug causing ships to get stuck when they run aground
 - Fix AI ships bouncing up and down vertically
 - Added a dialog box prompting the player to end the mission when they complete the last objective.
 - Changed default switch-weapon-group key from Shift to Tab (avoid sticky keys warning in Windows)
 - The long-range radar now indicates what direction the player is facing
 - Fix a bug causing the ocean to look odd when using the gun camera
 - Fix fullscreen/windowed UI not working as expected
 - Fix mouse input not working in the options and combat menus
 - Fix a bug causing dialog boxes to flicker and display incorrect content when fading in
 - Fix a bug causing AI ships to be permanently disabled if the player quits a mission by going off the edge of the map
 - Reduced speed of ocean waves to reduce feeling that playership is not moving
 - Miscellaneous performance improvements
 - Most ship designer functionality can be accessed via buttons in the main screen, instead of by bringing up a highly-nested menu.
 - Fix bugs in the specials UI: mouse input doesn't behave, unable to cancel out; ships unable to save after using specials UI
 - Destroyer armor weighs twice as much
 - Fix a bug causing the weight limit to be hit too soon when placing parts
 - Fix a bug in the ship designer preventing controllers from being able to move parts up/down
 - Fix slowdown when placing belowdecks parts (powerplants and propulsion)
 - Crates are smaller
 - Add two new high-tier ship propulsion systems
 - Add a back button to the hulls menu
 - Display flag names when picking flags
 - Fix to-do list displaying on top of flags
 - Fix flag picker being off-center
 - Flagpole part now has a flag in the part preview display
 - Save-ship dialog has confirm/cancel buttons
 - Show a warning if the player attempts to save a very slow ship
 - Fix a bug causing the decal preview to not be dismissed if the player cancels out of adding a new decal
 - Add an option to the intermission menu to play the next mission

My goals for the last two weeks were:

• Fix 40 issues
• Release a new demo build
• Implement the mission scripting logic needed for the tutorial mission: locking and unlocking controls, highlighting different parts of the HUD, and detecting when the player has performed specific tutorial actions.

I closed over 50 issues. Some were outdated or dupes, but that was still some really solid work, and the game made major strides in the polish department. The new demo is out (and has gotten 12 downloads). I can't say for certain that the tutorial scripting logic is all done, as the tutorial isn't done yet...but odds are that there'll be something more I'll need to do scripting-wise. Right now the tutorial covers moving the camera, backing up, going forwards, steering, and firing. It still needs to cover locking onto targets, switching targets, switching weapons, and activating specials. In order to do all that, I had to add the following scriptable behaviors:

• Lock out and unlock specific inputs (e.g. disabling the player's ability to shoot up until the point in the tutorial when they need to fire)
• Pausing gameplay until the player provides a specific input
• Highlighting a specific part of the UI
• Orienting the camera to point at a specific item of interest

In addition to those listed tasks, I also did some art direction, and integrated the title screen fanfare that my musician composed -- which involved updating my sound management code so it can crossfade between two music tracks.

My original, now laughably out-of-date goals for the next two weeks were:

• Implement mission 120 (Pearl Harbor) (including dialog)
• Rework control customization UI

This is wrong not just because I'm behind but because it assumed the original plotting for the game. Pearl Harbor has been moved back a fair bit since the initial plot now takes place entirely in the Pacific Ocean. My new goals for this two-week sprint are:

• Finish the tutorial: locking onto targets, switching targets, switching weapons, and activating specials, plus some incidental combat, filling in the tutorial map with allied buildings and other items of interest, basic cinematics, and dialog.
• Speak with Rami Ismail tomorrow and get his advice on marketing, then start following up on that advice.

Rami does a consulting thing where you can buy a half-hour or an hour of his time to talk about indie gamedev. I bought a half-hour. My #1 risk right now is that I release the game and nobody notices it, so I'm planning to talk to him about marketing. There's millions of articles out there on how to get your game noticed, of course, but they all tell you to do different things and there's also a lot to (potentially) do, so I'm hoping I can get some personalized expert advice.

I took advantage of Rami Ismail's consulting service (https://calendly.com/tha_rami) by buying a half-hour of his time to talk about marketing my game. Totally worth it. I took a bunch of notes, which I am now going to consolidate here.

My primary challenge is getting eyeballs on the game. That is to say, Rami does not believe that people will have trouble deciding if they like the game based on my marketing materials / Steam page. I have a very simple sell: this game lets you make ridiculous ships and create lots of explosions. People who like that will know they like it, people who don't will similarly know. In other words, the trick isn't convincing people who don't care about the game to care about it. The trick is convincing people who would care about it that it exists. So my goal, marketing-wise, is to make sure that I am targeting the people who are most likely to respond positively, with a message that best conveys what my game is like to play.

Rami advised doing a number of small Facebook campaigns. These would get pretty super-specific, e.g. targeting people who "liked" the games Warning Forever / Captain Forever. Run a $50 campaign, check how it performed, refine the campaign materials (trailer / screenshots), and repeat. Try to change one thing at a time, so that I can determine (based on the difference in clickthrough/conversion) what works and what doesn't.

My current trailer starts too slowly. This is feedback I'd gotten elsewhere that I hadn't quite believed yet. The opening shot with the arcing projectiles and the logo needs to be moved to later (it could be a closing shot, maybe), and we need to open with action instead.

One challenge is the profusion of crappy mobile naval combat games. They sell themselves with big dramatic shots of warships fighting, but the actual gameplay is pretty dull. I'll need to be aware of this and put my game's gameplay front and center in marketing.

$20 is a good price point because I can discount to $15. Running a "permanent discount" isn't a bad idea either, though I'll again want to run experiments once the game is launched to see what gets the best results. The game looks like an impulse buy (i.e. people aren't likely to spend a lot of time staring at the Steam page to try to decide if they want it) and impulse buys are facilitated by discounts.

Try to keep people playing the game so they talk about it more and build word of mouth. This is mostly about the design of the game -- making sure that the interplay between the ship designer and the combat mode enhances both of them. That way people can argue about what the best ship is to bring to X mission, or how to get the best use out of Y part. This also encourages Twitch streamers to stream the game, because they can talk about why they're making particular decisions, demonstrate expertise, and foster discussion in their own communities.

This is going to be an interesting challenge, since right now the designer is, to a fairly large extent, a "numbers go up" kind of thing -- you get better parts, you cram them into the ship, your ship is stronger, the next mission is harder. If I can rig things so that performing specific optimizations makes the ship better in specific circumstances, then there's more potential depth to the designer and gameplay. Maybe this is something I only make relevant on higher difficulties (so people can still play the numbers-go-up game on Normal difficulty, say) but it's good if the game supports it.

Don't focus marketing on facts, like how many parts/ships/missions there are. Focus on emotion and action. "Build the ultimate ship, fight impossible battles."

It's absolutely OK to hire someone if I don't have time to do all this. Right now I think I'm going to take a stab at doing it myself, but we'll see how it goes.

Check in with Rami again in March, by which point I should have a hyper-optimized Steam page with awesome trailers, lots of great screenshots, wishlist conversion numbers, and some analysis of what folks would talk about when building their ships.

The tutorial is done, barring refinements once it gets playtesting. My primary task for this week is to make another Facebook ad. I found the first ad to be quite stressful, but hopefully as I acclimate and get practice it'll become less so. As decompression from last week's stress, I spent most of Saturday tinkering with terrain. First I tried making chunky square terrain:

(https://i.imgur.com/HuHuY34l.png)

This was pretty easy to implement, but I couldn't live with the constant comparisons to Minecraft. I suppose I should have expected them; Minecraft is a huge game with a very distinctive aesthetic, so anything that looks like it will be compared to it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, so long as you aren't misleading your viewers about what kind of game you're making. Since I'm not making a crafting/building game though, I don't feel I can safely use that look.

My next attempt was hexagonal voxels, which was rather trickier to do. My first attempt really didn't look very good:

(https://i.imgur.com/7TOBXZ2l.png)

The heightmaps Unity uses for terrain have limited resolution, so getting clear, sharp edges with things that don't land precisely on a grid is impossible. My next attempt was to build the mesh directly, one vertex at a time. That gave much more interesting-looking results once I got it working:

(https://i.imgur.com/okRbBlTl.png)

However, ultimately I came to the conclusion that this kind of sharp / de-rezzed terrain draws attention to itself, which is the opposite of what I need from my terrain. After all, the focus should be on the ships and ocean; the terrain is just a backdrop. So I shelved all these techniques and just did a smoothed heightmap with a simple altitude-based gradient to color it:

(https://i.imgur.com/rQhAuXAl.png)

This is basically returning to where I started, but on the plus side, now I have a much better understanding of how terrain works in Unity, I can make new terrain faster, and I have far more confidence that the terrain I'm using is the right kind of terrain.

Firstly, have a new gun:

https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1358813481928065030 (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1358813481928065030)

Second, it's been two weeks, so it's time to check in again. Last time, my goals were:

• Finish the tutorial: locking onto targets, switching targets, switching weapons, and activating specials, plus some incidental combat, filling in the tutorial map with allied buildings and other items of interest, basic cinematics, and dialog.
• Speak with Rami fuckin' Ismail and get his advice on marketing, then start following up on that advice.

The tutorial is done, and I've run a couple of ads now on Facebook, with not-very-intelligible results. I'm starting to think that I should hire someone to handle marketing for me. Along similar lines, I have an interview with a writer later this week to see about bringing them on board for writing the game's dialog. That would allow me to focus on the gameplay and systems. I can do dialog, but it's not a skill I feel as comfortable with, so contracting that out would be a load off my mind (and a load on my pocketbook, but it can bear it, for now).

My goal remains to hit Early Access in May. Back in December, I thought that I would need to do these things to get there:

• Launch the Steam page
  
• Nail down the story for the portion of the game that will be in the EA build
• Write dialog for the missions
• Make a tutorial mission
  
• Figure out how activated special abilities work
  
• Overhaul the control remapping UI (partially done)
• Overhaul the ship selection UI (immediately prior to embarking on missions)
• Implement a free-play / instant-action mode where players can just sail out and blow stuff up.
• Fix bugs and apply polish

To this I will add:

• Rework the dialog UI to use the new full-body portraits that my artist is creating.

I have about 3 months. I'll aim for the beginning of May, but really anytime during that month would count as a success in my book. Things are a little up in the air for this week, since I speak to the writer on Thursday, and whether I can get them on-board or not will dictate how I plan out the rest of my time. So I think I'm only going to plan a one-week "sprint" right now. Therefore:

During this week, my goals are:
 - Overhaul the ship-selection UI
 - Polish the control remapping UI
 - Overhaul the dialog UI

It's a bunch of UI work, which isn't my favorite, but once it's done I should be clear to do a lot more of the fun stuff.

Time for another two-week update. The goal remains the same: enter Early Access in May. That gives us 2-3 months to get the game into shape. This feels a bit aggressive, but achievable, which is just about exactly the kind of goal I want to be setting.

In the last two weeks, my goal was to close 40 more bugs and draft the next 2 missions. Bug count is hard to estimate, since I went through and closed out over 50 bugs that were obsolete (i.e. required no work to resolve), but at minimum I got close to that goal. As for the missions, I have drafted mission #2, but mission #3 is unstarted. I'll blame this in part on depression, and in part on having to do some challenging and unexpected work. In particular, I spent a great deal of creative energy on music direction; the latest track (combat sailing music) required 8 revisions to get done, which meant an awful lot of attentive listening on my part. It's not as much work as the composer put in, of course, but it's unfamiliar and draining for me.

On the plus side, the writer I brought on board is up to speed and will be a huge help for handling dialog and plotting for all these missions.

I have 8 weeks left before May. I want to have rough drafts of all of the EA missions done mid-April, so we can refine and playtest before entering Early Access. Therefore, my goals for the next 2 weeks are:

 - Wrap up the Guam mission (mission 2)
 - Draft the Truk mission (mission 3)
 - Rework the ship secondary systems UI in the ship designer

Also, if you haven't already, please feel free to join the Discord (https://discord.gg/aCjxy9QGND)! This is how I'm conducting the closed beta, and it's also a good way to provide feedback and chat with other folks in the community.

Finally, a few tweets for your amusement:

https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1365462270235471881 (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1365462270235471881)

https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1365708274855600137 (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1365708274855600137)
(this one includes a snippet of music from that combat track I mentioned earlier)

https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1363174149611343875 (https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1363174149611343875)
(and this includes some of the non-combat sailing music)