State of Development
It’s been over two years since we launched into Steam Early Access, nearly two decades since we first put pen to paper imagining a WWI battleship game, and over a century since the Dreadnought era came to an end, scuttled at Scapa Flow.
The main menu’s new subdued, weathered style was inspired by several titles from the ‘golden age of RTS’.
Originally envisioned as a top-down turn-based strategy akin to Fire Emblem mixed with the BATTLESHIP board game, our game Ruler of the Waves 1916 launched on Steam and mobile as an on-rails 3D turret shooter and has slowly morphed into an RTS/FPS hybrid as the scope continues to expand.
Ultimately, the goal was to create the best game possible, not just meet some deadline or stick to an original plan.
To that end, we are grateful for the support we received along the way which we have reinvested into the game to add higher quality models, textures, music, and more.
We have meticulously planned out more features and ideas than we have time to work on, but after a hiatus for most of the year 2024, we have resumed development and are working on a revamped main menu, creating engine cinematics, and setting the stage for some big plans on the gameplay side.
Overall, we have a massive backlog but nevertheless a desire to see the project through. Some of our top features in development are:
- Main menu refresh: creating a more consistent and immersive style for the menus
Another example of the new main menu - look closely at the background to see the original terrain from the North Sea overmap.
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Ship texture update: add normal mapping, roughness, and metallic attributes for material shaders to some ‘papery’ ships
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Cinematics/cutscenes: setting the stage for campaign missions and creating promotional material
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Maps: introduce landscapes for unique strategies and obstacles
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Buildings: Add base building mechanics for structures like shore defence batteries, an admiralty to recruit officers, and dry docks to repair ships
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Survival missions: new mission objective to holdout for a given time period against waves of enemies (previously announced as Rogue Mission mode)
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Lifeboats: no more will every sailor be doomed to go down with their ship
Please stay tuned for future announcements!
Note on the Mobile Version
As we continue to improve and add to Ruler of the Waves and expand its RTS-style mechanics, it has become less feasible to maintain the mobile version of the game with the same features as the PC edition.
Aside from the challenges posed by different control inputs, graphics capabilities, and networking, the constantly changing requirements from both Google and Apple introduce the need to update the engine and perform various other busy works that the developer would prefer not to engage in for the time being over gameplay and feature updates.
As such, we are no longer planning to update the mobile version during the early access period. We might revisit in the future, but for now the entire focus of development will be on the PC version.
While the mobile version has been behind for a few updates now, we are making the announcement official as of today. The price of the mobile version was previously reduced to compensate, so please feel free to dive in for a more action/arcade-like experience on the go.