Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to the first devlog of Naumachia

In this devlog I would like to tell you a summary of the game, the current state of the project, the techniques used, and what the future goal of the project is. I would also like to show you my goals for the upcoming weeks until 2020 at the end.

Summary of Naumachia

Naumachia is a realtime strategy game set in space where you take command of your own fleet, fight massive space battles from a distance or take control of your fighters and destroy enemy fleets from up close and personal. Conquer the universe piece by piece and grow your alliance until you’re unstoppable!

The Project

A bit of history

Naumachia initially started out as a school project I did back in 2018 with 5 other students, this project had the focus of creating a 1v1 local multiplayer space shooter. We worked about 8-10 weeks on this project 2 days a week. At the end of the semester we had plans to continue the project over the summer, but we never did…

If you are curious on how that game looked, here a trailer we made for the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XmbMM30mCk

New direction

Now that I have restarted this project I’m going to take it into a completely different direction. I will be turning Naumachia into a real time strategy game with a twist.

In the final game you, the player, will fight large space battles from a commander view by giving orders to your fleet of spaceships. But if you want to get into the action up close you will have the possibility to take control of individual ships from your fleet to help out your own troops during battles.

For now this is the vision of what the game should become in the near future.

If you have any feedback about the idea, please let me know in the comments below this devlog, I'm always open to suggestions for gameplay elements and mechanics!

The tools and technology

The game will be created in Unity making use of  Unity Dots, the Date Oriented Technology Stack. Unity Dots gives developers the ability to write high performance multithreaded code without a lot of extra effort. Unity dots consists of three main parts

• Unity ecs, the Entiy Components System
• The C# Job system
• The BurstCompiler

If you would like to know more about Unity Dots, I have made a small playlist with some videos that helped me explaining how to use Unity Dots:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfTuLtpOZDX9JZV137-rr-N7B68Yt9rh8

Another great source of Unity Dots knowledge would be the samples provided by Unity themselves on their GitHub, for which i also have a nice link for you:

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples

The current state of the project

The past few weeks I have worked on a small demo project, to better understand and learn how to use Unity Dots and to see if the final goal would be possible using Unity Dots. 

This demo is available now on the games page right here on itch.io:

https://gameframestudios.itch.io/naumachia

In this demo you can fly around in space and, even though it's not accurate, shoot at about 15 to 25 thousand enemies. It's not a lot but hey it's a demo.

I made this demo to see how easy it is to use Unity Dots and if it would be feasible to make an entire game using Unity Dots as a major part of it.

What's next?

The next goal will be creating a basic version of the realtime strategy part of the game.

I have already started working on this and it is looking promising that the the first version of this could be finished within the next 2-3 weeks.  

So if you are interested in the project stay on the look out.

Furthermore, I am planning on starting a devlog series about this project over on YouTube.

The first one should be online next Sunday (November 16th 2019). This will include a more in depth look at the demo that i have released here on itch.io. So if you would like to know more about how I implemented Unity Dots in the demo take a look at it:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiaCHM6yvI4jdUFsLBvtX8g

If you made it to this point, I first would like to say, Thank you for reading this devlog!

I'm very excited to finally show of a project I'm making, and I hope you will stick around following the development of this project.

Thanks again!

- Joris