My game needs a soundtrack! This is a milestone-based contract position. I will want an exclusive license for use of the music in games; the musician will retain ownership of the IP and can use it for other non-game purposes as they see fit.

This page has the full job description. I'm happy to answer questions here, over PM, or over email. Thank you!

I'm looking to pay a musician to compose music for my game! Here's the job description. If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out!

Hot on the heels of yesterday's release, a new patch!

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.

A new demo is out! This is version 0.03. Go check it out!

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

Screenshot Saturday tweet

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.

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.

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.



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!

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!

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:





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

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 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.

[Download the demo!]

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.







Download the demo!

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Horribly out-of-date trailer:




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!

Gotta love your creativity, baconman. <3

I do want to stress that my goal isn't to create a sandbox / construction game like Minecraft. Minecraft itself (and apparently Terraria) have that well in hand. Terrain manipulation is a means to assist combat and possibly to improve navigation of the dungeon; anything beyond that is "just" flavor.

A food system done well puts the player under continual pressure to continue exploring lest they run out of food. Done poorly, food becomes sufficiently plentiful that it turns into a "press X to not die" mechanic (or overly-available healing, depending). The problem is that the inexperienced player either finds the game punishingly hard because they can never find enough food, or finds there to be an adequate supply...but in the latter case, the experienced player has more food than he can use, and steady-stating the game becomes more or less trivial. That's one reason why I'm favoring going with a strictly limited carryable "food supply" -- be you veteran or newbie, you'll find yourself having to decide between pressing on despite being hurt, or spending your limited healing now. Veterans will last longer but they'll still have that pressure.

Good call on additional gases and "flavored" liquids, though. They don't necessarily need to interact with other terrain types to have gameplay effects; poisonous gas would create a handy damage field, for example.

Thanks for the thoughts, guys. Looks like this idea wasn't quite fleshed-out enough to post here yet. Let me provide some clarification as guided by your questions:

The plan is for a 3D roguelike -- so instead of 2D tiles being the basic unit of space, we have 3D cubes. Each cube has a composition -- dirt, rock, water, etc. I am indeed looking for a "crafting system" which combines different terrain types to make new ones. The difficulty I have is that most terrain types are solid and thus don't really seem like they could combine with each other, and there's only so much you can do with magma and water as your two liquids. You get a bit more variety if you add temperature to the mix:

 * Wet stone + freeze -> shatter, creating rubble (dirt?)
 * Magma + freeze -> stone
 * Magma + water -> steam (also water -> boil -> steam)
 * Dirt + water -> bush (partial cover)
 * Bush + water -> tree (full cover)
 * Tree + steam -> jungle (impassable)
 * Dirt + heat -> sand (reduced movement speed? Fluid? How would it interact with other terrains if so?)
 * Rock + heat -> glowing hot rock (causes heat damage)

But can anyone think of a way to have two adjacent solid terrain types interact? Should they interact?

My comment on movement abilities was mostly in that I don't want the player to easily be able to bug out of difficult situations. Stuff like teleporting large distances or instantly leaving the level entirely are pretty common in many roguelikes (including games like Diablo and Torchlight here, though they're far from the only offenders). This reduces tension. Movement abilities when used for positioning are fine, though they can be taken overboard -- for example, I think it's probably too easy in the Disgaea series to put your characters where you want them, much as I love the concept of tossing party members around the board. Mostly you just need to pay attention to how the movement abilities you've provided affect the tactical game and make certain they're useful without getting out of hand. So yeah, some limited movement abilities should probably make it in.

As for regeneration, I really, really don't want the player to be able to "rest" to recover. It's boring and and overplayed concept. The ideal I'm shooting for is that the tactical game never really stops except when the player finally does concede to attrition and flees the level. A skilled player should be able to steady-state by taking advantage of the instant-recovery items monsters drop, but otherwise you get those three restores which have to be rationed across the entire dive. Maybe there could be random one-shot fountains to give you a boost, but they shouldn't be able to be relied on.

Certainly once I have the basic mechanics in place, it should be straightforward to add more ways to take advantage of them. Monsters and traps that can manipulate the terrain are an obvious outgrowth of having an interesting terrain system (though tweaking them to be fun and interesting themselves will doubtless be an iterative process).

Thanks for the Terraria recommendation, baconman. I'll have to check it out.

I've been giving some thought to trying to make a roguelike game. My interest is in relatively small-scale tactical combat, where you need to carefully consider your positioning with respect to your opponent as well as which techniques to use. I also like the concept of terrain deformation and manipulation, and want it to be a key aspect of that tactical approach. That is, the player should need to control terrain to do well in fights, either by positioning himself advantageously or by outright changing the terrain.

So the thought is to have a procedurally-generated 3D cave system composed of chunky cubes (vaguely Minecraft-style). Each cube has a terrain type (e.g. dirt, rock, river, ice, magma) and the types need to be able to interact with each other in meaningful ways. The player would have abilities to create, destroy, and shove cubes around. Some examples:

 * Being above your target gives you a comparative advantage
 * Raise a maze of stalagmites to interfere with enemy motion
 * Undermine a cliff to collapse it, causing a landslide
 * Punch a hole in a wall to unleash an underground river
 * Place landmines which, when activated, not only explode but also remove terrain, trapping the victims in pits
 * Stand in magma, assuming you can survive it, and enemies attacking you get hurt while your own attacks are imbued with heat
 * Superheat yourself and jump in a river to blast nearby opponents with steam

So what I'm looking for is ways to adapt these concepts to actual mechanics. In particular, I want more terrain manipulation abilities, and more ways for different terrain types to interact. Let's say for the sake of argument that the following terrain types are in:

 * Dirt, also encompassing sand, clay, etc. Sort of a chunky liquid, in the sense that it needs support or it will cave in. Also supports life.
 * Rock of all types. Solid, dependable, nothing beats rock.
 * Water, in the form of pools and rivers. Basic, chunky fluid mechanics will be needed (Dwarf Fortress-style).
 * Ice as a static form of water.
 * Magma, like water. Magma + water = steam + rock.

Some possible interactions I could see:
 * Dirt + water -> plant life. But what would plants do? Trees could provide cover and stabilize the dirt to prevent it from collapsing...beyond that?
 * Magma eats dirt, and could slowly consume (limited types of?) rock as well
 * Ice + magma -> explosion of ice shards

But this really doesn't seem to be enough depth to base a game on. Of course I also have the basic shape of the terrain to play with, so there's things like height advantages, lines of sight, cover, etc, but I'd like the actual terrain to have more meaning as well.

As far as combat is concerned, I'll probably stick to the fantasy staples -- melee, bows, and spells. Of course each will have some special abilities for manipulating terrain.

Some things I would like to avoid:
 * Mobility and teleportation abilities. Getting trapped should be bad; giving the player easy escapes lessens tension. The player will have the ability to slowly climb walls, so getting stuck in a pit is tactically problematic but not an automatic death sentence.
 * Healing abilities. I want the player to soldier on regardless of their current state, so there is no resting, no "natural" recovery. Killed monsters drop essences that instantly recover you a bit on being picked up, and you have three slow full-regens that are only restored when returning to town, but otherwise you're on your own. The better you are at combat, the more self-sufficient you are and the longer you're able to go without bugging out.

I'd love to hear any suggestions y'all have.

Oddly enough you could have made Link to the Past's Ganon reasonably more difficult simply by speeding him up a bit; he's mostly easy because his attacks are largely trivial to dodge; the only one that's especially challenging is when he spirals the firebats out and then back in, and once you know that's coming you just stay outside the maximum radius of the spiral. But if you sped up his trident and his "shoot bats at you" attacks, and left less vulnerable time between attacks, he'd be significantly harder without being annoying. At least that's my supposition.

RPS is a pretty simple game; the only skill involved is predicted what the other person will choose, so it doesn't deserve that high of a skill rating.

Predicting what other people will do, particularly when their actions are based on what they think you are going to do, is not easy.

Just as a random aside, the Iain M Banks novel Player of Games discusses gaming in a post-scarcity (post-singularity) civilization. It notes in an aside that purely skill-based perfect-knowledge games were all "solvable" (combinatorial explosions apparently no longer presenting a barrier to the inconceivably vast AIs of the day) and thus had fallen out of favor. All games that were considered worth playing had some amount of luck and/or hidden knowledge, and the player's skill was not just in dealing with the known and the rules of the game but also in anticipating the unknown and preparing for unexpected changes.

The book's pretty awesome in general, though it doesn't do much on game theory.

I always found that fight to be tedious -- there's absolutely nothing you can do to speed it up. Hell, if Robotnik hadn't tossed those spiked balls into the lava there's no way you could win -- he could just keep tilting things back and forth until you screwed up the jumps one too many times.

I have to agree with Samtagonist that random "Whoops, I'm invulnerable now" phases are annoying. I can accept bosses snapping out of hitstun (after all, otherwise they'd just be stunlocked until death) but choosing to then make them invincible besides is lame. It's just enforcing turn-based combat. In a realtime game.

I'll have to check out Monster Hunter sometime. If it's anything like what it sounds like (which is the bosses from Devil May Cry 1, scaled up) then it should be pretty awesome.

Hearts of Iron is too focused to actual wafaring, heck WW2... That is also problem with Civ's, too much warfaring going on all the time.

To be fair, there's conflict going on somewhere on the Earth basically all the time. This is of course exacerbated in a game setting, since anything you can do to drag down your opponent is typically equivalent to boosting yourself. I used to be on the Civ4 forums, and people would make reference to the "Axeman Wonder", a Great Wonder you could build that consisted of an army of axemen who would go out and capture a neighboring civ's capital for you.

As far as the essentials for a civ game, well, they're 4X games, so you X-plore, X-pand, X-ploit, X-terminate. Everything therefore basically comes down to how much detail you want to have for each of those items, and how they interconnect.

Well, how do you define procedurally-generated attacks? Warning Forever has bosses that are just procedurally-generated agglomerations of modules with various guns, lasers, missile launchers, etc. on them that fire at semi-random intervals while moving about hinge joints. So given the lack of a "turn-based" approach to combat, and the nature of the boss, it arguably fulfills both requirements. But I don't know that that's what you were going for.

Then there's FPS bots, which have a very small selection of basic actions (for many games, run/jump/shoot/switch weapon would suffice!) but combine those actions in complex ways. Some of the more clever ones will also learn throughout the match which tactics are working and which aren't, and adjust their action selections to suit. Here I'm mostly thinking about UT-style deathmatch games, though presumably similar logic applies to the more recent FPSen that I haven't played.