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[Derakon]

The logo is finalized!



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.

[Beastboy]

Very retro, I like it

[Derakon]

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.

[Derakon]

The Steam page for Waves of Steel is LIVE! Wishlist the game!



Spread the word on Twitter! Your help is greatly appreciated!

[Derakon]

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

[Derakon]

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





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

[Derakon]

I put out a new demo 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

[Derakon]

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.

[Derakon]

I took advantage of Rami Ismail's consulting service 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.

[Derakon]

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:



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:



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:



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:



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.

[Derakon]

Firstly, have a new gun:

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.

[Derakon]

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! 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/1365708274855600137
(this one includes a snippet of music from that combat track I mentioned earlier)

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