Flotilla WWII

The game

Flotilla WWII is a naval TBS (Turn Based Strategy) game, in which the player is in charge of building and commanding naval and air units as well as producing resources to expand his force, with the aim to wipe the enemy's presence from an island cluster in the Pacific in WWII. The game features simple mechanics with production and support buildings, ships of different sizes, ranges, speeds and durability, and aircraft with distinct roles and is, won when the enemy is left with no units and insufficient resources to build the cheapest unit or a factory.

The player uses the left mouse button to select units and the right mouse button to issue orders, which are a move or target order, depending of whether ther is an enemy unit in the specified tile or not. Through the UI the player can build ship and buildings by clicking on the appropriate button and then clicking to place it on the map, as long as the unit ghost is green, indicating that it is a valid build point. Through the menus, the player can select to load a saved game (with a preview of the minimap displayed), start a new game with specific sides and map sizes (powers of 2 from 16 to 256) as well as the option to disable AI for local multiplayer.

Development:

The game makes use of the 2D components of the XNA Framework, a .NET wrapper for DirectX. It is written in C# and has followed a very structured development so it can be easily extended or modified. Although the game is not intended to be significantly extended, improvements like animated water, smoke effects, higher resolution textures and others were added with minimal changes to the existing code, proving that the design was versatile. Furthermore, the structure of the UI proved very effective and provided the template to design the flexible self-contained UI library for my next projects. The programming was done in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, and the graphics were created in Clip Studio Paint, for the music, initial composition was done with Guitar Pro 6, but the version that made it into the game was recorded and enriched by a fellow programmer and musician that goes by the alias Astratos.

Release and performance:

Flotilla WWII was initially released on IndieDB as a demo and submitted on Steam Greenlight. Initial responses were quite split but mostly critical of the poor graphics, this was taken into consideration and the graphics were completely rebuilt and a new version was released, unfortunately by then so many other titles had been submitted to Greenlight that it was too late for it to take effect. After a couple of itterations, the demo entered the top 100 of IndieDB and remained there for a few days, making it into IndieDB's frontpage slideshow. When Greenlight was shut down, Valve staff sorted through all the submissions, manually approving those that showed promise. Although it is unknown what percentage of games was approved or rejected, Flotilla WWII was among the submissions that were approved, and so it was official that the game would be published on Steam. Currently the final touches are being put, and the paperwork is being taken care of (mostly figuring out taxation issues), and hopefully in a few months Flotilla WWII will make its debut on Steam.