Tides of War

Awesome work so far guys, but I'm wondering which games Steel Waves will take after?

From the alpha footage and description it appears like it'll be a decent replica of Battlestations: Midway/Pacific only focusing more on the warships instead of the hybrid air/sea combat.

 

So, more Battlestations or more World of Battleships? ;D

Hi EdFishy,

From what I understand it will be more focused on the sea battles than anything else. They do have subs already modeled and ready to implement into the game. I'll let Phil speak about that more.

Awesome work so far guys, but I'm wondering which games Steel Waves will take after?

From the alpha footage and description it appears like it'll be a decent replica of Battlestations: Midway/Pacific only focusing more on the warships instead of the hybrid air/sea combat.

 

So, more Battlestations or more World of Battleships? ;D

Cheers for the support EdFishy.

Try not to think of it as "what game are we trying to be like" try to think of it as "What game should be like ours"

we're trying to create a game that, broadly yes, is like our competitors, that comes with making a game in the same genre, but we're exploring it from a different angle. We're making an Arcade Sim, so it has the appealing and the "Jump in and Play" quality of an arcade game (World of Battleships) but it also retains some of the hardcore aspects and mechanics that you might expect from a pure simulator, just without the steep learning curve and the knowledge of how it all works prior to playing.

 

As for your question

For the demo that we're producing for the Kickstarter we're focusing only on battleships, it will have one ship (the KGV) with a little bit of customisation on the turrets and engines and you'll be playing on one map with 3 game modes (Free For All, Team Death Match & King of the Hill), it'll be up to 8V8 or 16 players in FFA.

 

Hi EdFishy,

From what I understand it will be more focused on the sea battles than anything else. They do have subs already modeled and ready to implement into the game. I'll let Phil speak about that more.

To further what Erich has said

For the moment we're focusing on above water combat, and getting that down to a fine art.

The mechanic for submarines is there but it is really broken at the moment and not at all what we want to show off just yet. 

We do have plans to add things like a support class which would be an aircraft carrier where you can send planes out on missions for reckon, defence, attack etc but that role would mean you would sit at the back and it would almost play like an RTS, that and people would have to actively defend you as your offensive weapons would be limited.

 

We do have plans to expand the game beyond the current scope with more ships, modules, maps, modes, more players on the maps, clan systems, decals, flags, daily missions & achievements. 

our ultimate goal which will take a few years at least is to turn this into an MMO, but like i say that will take a long time and since we're a studio that wants our players to let us know what we want we'll be building and creating based off feedback

 

If you have any more questions then please do ask

Sounds more ambitious then a simple Unity game!

 

It has a look and feel of a Battlestations game, and I can tell ya there's a whole slew of dispondent Battlestations fans who were left kind of in the dust with the last BS game.  I imagine though atleast a sizeable minority of its fans would pull for hybrid air combat, which I'd agree is not a necessary element to what should be a game of "Battleships".

 

Keeping your head about you with a multi-year plan is key, since development can be awfully exciting in the beginning with rapid progress and slow down to a crawl when you get knee deep in the real heavy work, so I'm glad you guys aren't just a rookie crew just jumping right into this.  That said, taking an 8 vs. 8 Unity demo to an MMO will be an awfully precarious journey (Enigma and Deep Six were sunk on this very quest!), so be sure to manage this one with small milestones in mind.

 

We've got a long way to go so I don't want to ask questions that you're hesitant to answer, but I do wonder what are the hardware considerations?  Are we talking "most detailed ships in a game" or something manageable by average hardware setups?

 

Thanks again for the work you guys are doing!

Sounds more ambitious then a simple Unity game!

 

It has a look and feel of a Battlestations game, and I can tell ya there's a whole slew of dispondent Battlestations fans who were left kind of in the dust with the last BS game.  I imagine though atleast a sizeable minority of its fans would pull for hybrid air combat, which I'd agree is not a necessary element to what should be a game of "Battleships".

 

Keeping your head about you with a multi-year plan is key, since development can be awfully exciting in the beginning with rapid progress and slow down to a crawl when you get knee deep in the real heavy work, so I'm glad you guys aren't just a rookie crew just jumping right into this.  That said, taking an 8 vs. 8 Unity demo to an MMO will be an awfully precarious journey (Enigma and Deep Six were sunk on this very quest!), so be sure to manage this one with small milestones in mind.

 

We've got a long way to go so I don't want to ask questions that you're hesitant to answer, but I do wonder what are the hardware considerations?  Are we talking "most detailed ships in a game" or something manageable by average hardware setups?

 

Thanks again for the work you guys are doing!

Battleships and Submarines are our focus at the moment. Once we have those in and polished and people are happy playing them then we'll be expanding into some support roles and such. We're not just gonna keep throwing things at the game in a "Please like and play this feature/mechanic"

We're not aiming to do what Battlestations did with its funky hybrid system, its very much in the concept stage at the moment and the mechancics arent even in the game yet so its something we can work on with community feedback.

 

The Base game (V1.0) SHOULD be out in Q1 of 2015. That would just be Surface Vessels and Submarines, a few maps, a few modes and it polished to a nice shine. From there we can expand but we're not going to over do it for launch as we want a nice tidy game that runs well, plays well and leaves a good impression on people

The jump from 8v8 to MMO is a big one and like i said before will take years if it ever happens. We might find during development that people dont want an MMO out of it and so we won't make one

 

at the moment we're using mid range computers (£500 each) in the studio (aside from my laptop). You know they're not one of those super gaming rigs that costs £10k, we're building and running the game on what would be a entry level low-mid range gaming rig.

currently the game is unoptimised, a bit jittery and has a few bugs (hey it is pre-alpha after all) but it does run between 30 - 40 FPS on max. The ships currently stand at about 20k tris which is fairly standard for something like that.

 

Any more questions and i'll be happy to answer

Good info, nothing new to add... just get us some playtesting to do!

I just wanna clarify that although our game takes inspiration from WW2 we're actually setting this game in an alternate world with different Factions and Political Ideals. The world map we're creating is not going to be based off of Earth, we're making one that can give us a wide range of possibilities and that means places for you to play

 

We are making an Arcade Sim afterall and we want people to be able to go in, play & have fun.

We also dont want to upset anyone by not being 100% accurate with our depictions of ships, subs, events, maps etc etc. 

 

From the era we're talking about (1930's - 1960's) finding some high quality and accurate reference is surprisingly hard in some cases, and where there is reference for something we're building (like a ship interior) we have to take artistic licence or pay quite a large sum of money and just go with what think would be right

 

We want to use our own designs that are based on real world ships and because of that we can set ourselves apart from other naval combat game out there. This method also gives the community the chance to submit designs to us for possible creation in game