BYOBattleship: naval combat sim + ship designer

[Derakon]

I'm getting closer to having a proper "vertical slice" that shows off content in every part of the game. The major remaining items I can think of are:

- Completing missions shows a mission summary screen, including tech point rewards.
- Ships can drop pickups during missions (health, ammo, and tech intel).
- Some parts require intel to be found before they can be researched.
- Weapons use ammo.
- Group weapons into firing groups in the ship designer.
- Build some properly historical ship designs to use for enemy ships.
- Fill in stats for ship endurance and weapon damage -- currently all ships have 100 health and all weapons do 1 damage, which isn't exactly great.
- Build, oh, three complete missions.

At the beginning of October I'd hoped to have a vertical slice done by the end of the month. That now doesn't look likely -- making the tech tree took longer than I'd hoped. But hopefully by the end of November I'll have something people can bang on.

[bratman]

Good initiative brother

[Derakon]

Thank you!

I spent today updating the ship designer UI:

https://i.imgur.com/4l9FFGC.mp4

[Gauss]

Will the game feature SSN?(nuclear attack subs)
It would be a blast

[Derakon]

I definitely plan to include AI-controlled subs. I would like to include player-controlled subs, but they'll be a different playstyle (different controls, I'd need to make underwater graphics, the ship designer would need different rules, etc.), so it's really a matter of how well everything else goes and how much time I have.

I do not currently plan to include nuclear missiles, for the same reason I don't plan to include playable aircraft carriers: they fundamentally change the nature of the game in ways I don't want to explore. This is a game about massed "small" weaponry, not about weapons that can wipe out entire enemy fleets with a single shot.

[Derakon]

Last week's work was pretty dry, mostly rearranging data and fixing bugs.

Today I replaced the combat-mode HUD with a more graphical one.

https://i.imgur.com/r9fPz9u.mp4

[Derakon]

I decided to make a flamethrower today.

https://i.imgur.com/vH6AucG.mp4

This included an interesting bug where the flame streams weren't getting cleaned up correctly:



which I weaponized:



and then took to illogical extremes:



My computer can't really keep up with a 64-barreled flamethrower, alas.

[Derakon]

My last couple of coding days have been spent on adding button prompts and improving the dialog system.

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

Dialog now fades in over time, you can speed it up, snap in the entire page, and go backwards if you missed something. I've never understood why more games don't have the ability to go backwards in dialog. Some games will go to the trouble of having an entire separate part of the UI where you can review old conversations, but when you're actually in a conversation it remains completely linear. I don't think my dialog system will cover anything particularly important, outside of the tutorials, but dangit if you want to reread something you'll be able to.

[Derakon]

This is still alive, I just haven't been posting here much. I spent some time today working on fixing a pernicious little bug in the ship designer, and when I was done I went a bit overboard.

[Gauss]

Do you have a release date yet?

[Derakon]

Not even remotely, sorry! I'm still building fairly fundamental parts of the game system, with only the barest smattering of content. It's going to be awhile before it's done.

Trust me, I want to play it as much as you do.

[Derakon]

Have a boss ship.

[Raajaton]

This is really cool! I'm look forward to doing some playtesting in the future.

Keep it up man!

[Derakon]

Thank you! I'm looking forward to being able to play the game too.

[Derakon]

Here's 79 of the ship parts I've modeled so far. 15 out of 49 playable ships are done...

https://i.imgur.com/uyU7QqA.mp4