BYOBattleship: naval combat sim + ship designer

[Derakon]

This is wildly off-topic for these forums, but I wanted to share a project I've been working on recently, and hope to continue to work on for awhile. It's a videogame, an arcadey naval combat sim where you can design your own ship to play as. If you've played Warship Gunner (an old PS2-era game), that's basically my design document: a singleplayer campaign through very alt-history WW2, with a variety of missions where you gradually accumulate new and better ship hulls and parts to take on bigger and stronger enemies. The working title, as per the thread title, is BYOBattleship.



I'm still working on implementing fairly fundamental game concepts, but the ship designer works:

https://i.imgur.com/Ch2b7mW.mp4

and here's a video of me stress-testing the projectile system:

https://i.imgur.com/P4ZPK3Q.mp4

So while I still have an awful lot of work to do, it's showing promise.

I don't yet have a centralized place for updates, but I'm happy to chat about it here if y'all want to.

[MITZE]

While sadly not something that I'm that likely to play myself, this is really cool.

Really like the name you went with!

[Derakon]

Thanks. I recognize it's pretty far out from what folks around here mostly play, but I felt that out of the various genres I'm interested in, this is one where there's relatively little competition -- or, to put it another way, I don't need to make games in other genres because other people are already doing it for me.

Today I taught my AI ships the basics of not running into things. They used to just make a beeline for the player's ship and ram into it, which is...rarely realistic, and not very fun to deal with as being rammed greatly reduces your ability to maneuver. The new behavior clearly still needs some work, but it's a start:

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

[DrWho42]

looks fun! do you maybe have a youtube channel so i could keep up with your work?

[wobbly]

I can't help seeing BYOBS in that name

I'm a bit of a sucker for "design your own" style games. What kind of system is it going to be? slots?

Edit: Nevermind, its in the link

[DrWho42]

I can't help seeing BYOBS in that name

ha! i too read it as "bring your own bs" :P

[fph]

Come on, let us all play that game together and BOOBS (bring our own battleships).

[Derakon]

looks fun! do you maybe have a youtube channel so i could keep up with your work?

Thank you, and no, not yet. I will absolutely update this thread when I do. For the time being I've just been making short videos and sharing them in forums threads like this one.

I can't help seeing BYOBS in that name

I think if that's the worst I have to put up with, I'll be fine.

I'm a bit of a sucker for "design your own" style games. What kind of system is it going to be? slots?

Edit: Nevermind, its in the link

Yeah, it's pretty freeform. I want the ship design mode to make you feel like you have a lot of freedom while also having to take a variety of systems into account. So for example, bigger guns take up more belowdecks space, which cuts into the space that your boilers and screws occupy. And all belowdecks objects cut into your "volume" stat, which is required to add secondary systems like radar/sonar rooms, high-speed weapon loaders, etc. You'll be able to add more volume by building superstructure on top of the deck, but that cuts into the space you could use for more guns. And of course everything you add to your ship adds mass, which limits your speed and your capacity to add more armor.

At the moment I just have the "parts can't intersect other parts" and "parts must be fully on deck" bits implemented though. There's still lots more work to do.

[Derakon]

Today's major accomplishment was adding materials/textures to the ships.



This uses what's called "physically based rendering" which is basically a fancy term for having a whole bunch of textures to define various properties of the material like color, surface normal, reflectivity, etc. I downloaded these textures from FreePBR.com. They still clearly need some work, but they're just as clearly a huge step up from what I had previously.

This took some iteration. My initial attempts looked like this:



Or this:



Anyway, this was the big thing that was blocking me from adding more art to the game: I wanted to make sure I had every aspect of my pipeline sorted out before I churned out a bunch of new assets. So now whenever I feel blocked I can just spit out a new ship or gun or whatever and at least get that accomplished.

Today's minor accomplishment was making the ships stop traveling backwards. How did I not notice this was happening before? Literally all the ships were traveling aft-end-first. The cause was one of those trivial little things that's obvious in retrospect: in Blender's exporter, I'd set the "Forward" direction to be -Z instead of Z.

[Pete Mack]

My problem with all these games is the ships don't really act like battleships. Allied WWII battleships had an effective range of 20,000 yards, minimum. That is 700 boat lengths, over 10 miles. Even Jutland was fought at a minimum of 6 miles.

[Derakon]

My problem with all these games is the ships don't really act like battleships. Allied WWII battleships had an effective range of 20,000 yards, minimum. That is 700 boat lengths, over 10 miles. Even Jutland was fought at a minimum of 6 miles.

I hear you, and I do think there's probably space for someone to make a more tactical/cerebral "engage from beyond visual range" kind of game. But it'd have a more limited audience than the kind of game you get when ranges are more compact, ships are more maneuverable, and everything's a lot more explodey. Plus I'm not really equipped to do justice to a detail-oriented game: I don't know how to go about calculating armor penetration or how to present a UI that lets players know about how much risk their ammo depot is of catching fire, which are IMO things that go hand-in-hand with the long-range engagements you're asking for.

My primary inspiration for this project is Warship Gunner 2, which is pretty well the antithesis of what you're asking for. Sorry!

[Nick]

I hear you, and I do think there's probably space for someone to make a more tactical/cerebral "engage from beyond visual range" kind of game. But it'd have a more limited audience than the kind of game you get when ranges are more compact, ships are more maneuverable, and everything's a lot more explodey.

...says the author of RocketBand

[Derakon]

...says the author of RocketBand

Which, I will note, has yet to overtake Vanilla on the ladder when it comes to popularity.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Which, I will note, has yet to overtake Vanilla on the ladder when it comes to popularity.

Just waiting for the update.

[Derakon]

Continuing the theme from the last update, I've improved some visual effects:



New gun flashes, new shell effects, and new smoke from the smokestacks.

I also set up a Twitter account, @byobattleship, if you want to follow things that way.