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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsBYOBattleship: naval combat sim + ship designer
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Author Topic: BYOBattleship: naval combat sim + ship designer  (Read 4144 times)
Derakon
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« on: July 01, 2020, 09:14:27 AM »

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!

Twitter
Twitch devstreams

Horribly out-of-date trailer: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!
« Last Edit: October 31, 2020, 07:01:38 AM by Derakon » Logged
zircon
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« Reply #1 on: July 01, 2020, 09:40:29 AM »

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...
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Derakon
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« Reply #2 on: July 01, 2020, 10:00:01 AM »

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.
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Derakon
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« Reply #3 on: September 02, 2020, 01:45:47 PM »

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.

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Beastboy
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« Reply #4 on: September 02, 2020, 01:52:28 PM »

That flyng battleship make me dream of scifi wars. Hope it will be a permanent adition
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Derakon
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« Reply #5 on: September 02, 2020, 02:01:18 PM »

It's the first boss; it's absolutely staying in!  Wink 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!
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Derakon
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« Reply #6 on: September 04, 2020, 05:32:32 PM »

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!
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Derakon
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« Reply #7 on: September 08, 2020, 02:37:23 PM »

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.
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Derakon
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« Reply #8 on: September 19, 2020, 11:14:50 AM »

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.
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Derakon
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« Reply #9 on: September 21, 2020, 12:13:03 PM »

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
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Derakon
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« Reply #10 on: September 22, 2020, 07:35:42 AM »

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.
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Derakon
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« Reply #11 on: September 28, 2020, 03:37:24 PM »

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!
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Derakon
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« Reply #12 on: October 03, 2020, 07:13:27 AM »

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
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Derakon
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« Reply #13 on: October 11, 2020, 07:33:36 PM »

Have some playful orcas

Is there any way to embed videos into posts on this forum?
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Derakon
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« Reply #14 on: October 17, 2020, 09:52:37 AM »

Today's Screenshot Saturday 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.
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jsnell
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« Reply #15 on: October 22, 2020, 10:09:54 AM »

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?
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Derakon
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« Reply #16 on: October 22, 2020, 04:39:21 PM »

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. Nothing super exciting, but I'm reasonably happy with where that is now.
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Derakon
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« Reply #17 on: October 24, 2020, 01:36:37 PM »

A couple of sci-fi weapons for Screenshot Saturday
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Derakon
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« Reply #18 on: October 31, 2020, 07:02:28 AM »

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



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.
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Derakon
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« Reply #19 on: December 28, 2020, 05:05:59 PM »

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:













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