Making naval simulation accessible

At the time of writing I'm soon to be releasing Micro Anti Submarine Warfare, a "sim-lite" submarine hunting game that takes real naval simulation mechanics and makes them accessible to non-simulation players: https://rushyo.itch.io/micro-asw

Micro ASW was born partly out of frustration with the complexity of the many naval simulations that litter my Steam library. Games such as Command: Modern Operations and DCS offer complex and deep military simulations but, even to people very fluent in military systems and procedures, the games require a high cognitive load to play and are typically very hard to simply 'pick up and play'. At the same time, playing DCS I realised that much of the time I'm not looking for a full spectrum of complexity - I simply want to experience one part or another of the simulation - yet I need to engage with the full depth of the simulation to really take part.

While I have some less-detailed simulations in my library as well, such as Cold Waters or UBOAT, I feel that each has significant issues such as lack of replayability or length of scenarios respectively. I find myself almost sighing as I scroll through my library looking for a 'kick' of naval gameplay but not wanting to commit several hours to a single session and sighing as I open up Rimworld for another morsel of simple but addictive gameplay instead.

Micro ASW was also built out of a desire to make a game for a more general audience than I normally do. Traditionally I produce simulations and strategy games aimed at technical players. As a very study-focused person myself, I often build experiences that encourage players to burrow deep in to a particular topic to become fluent at the game. Thus, I set myself a challenge to build a game in 5 days that would scratch my itch for naval simulation gameplay but which would be accessible to a general audience of non-sim players. I coined the term "sim-lite" to direct my intentions - something that has the underbelly of a game simulation but which wouldn't come with the baggage a player might typically associated with the authenticity of a full simulation.

Although on paper 'submarine hunting' with a helicopter sounds quite straight-forward, in practical terms there are a lot of concepts that are quite alien to a casual audience. Even the concept of 'sonar', which I sort of take for granted, isn't intuitive to someone who isn't versed in naval games (one playtester kept referring to it as "oh, so it's like radar but underwater"). Thus I decided to build the game around its tutorials initially, rather than building a gameplay vertical slice and working from there.

I wanted to adopt a show + tell + do approach to the tutorial design. By providing textual, visual, and interactive tutorials I hoped at least one, preferably two, of the guides would stick with the player allowing them to use the relevant system and take it further in to the tutorial.

If I had to critique the tutorials in their current state I would say that the 'tell' portion isn't well written in Plain English - I need to revise some of the text to make it a bit less intimidating and get across some of the advantages/disadvantages of certain weapon systems better. In practice I still find that my players can figure everything out mainly from the interactive portion, but the initial wordiness of the tutorials is somewhat off-putting and doesn't always get across what I intended.

On the plus side, the show + tell components are easily accessible from the main menu, and the interactive tutorials are very short, so if the player needs a refresher on anything they're always very close to hand.

The decision to make an 'Anti Submarine Warfare' game was a choice to limit the scope of the game. By deliberately avoiding gameplay related to missions involving engaging surface or air targets, I can avoid things such as radar calculations, missile intercepts, and many more things which, while I know how to implement them, would increase the cognitive complexity for the player. I'm quite happy I did, as it's made the game much more focused than many of my previous simulations. There are a few cheeky abstractions that have come out of this, such as the fact that I can't have both player-controlled and enemy AI surface ships on the same map, lest the player bring them in to missile range of each other and ruin the illusion! It also leaves open the door to create a series of similar games should this one prove popular, each covering different areas of naval warfare.

Another initial design choice which proved precient is that all of areas involving speed or range were written with multiplying constants in the code, e.g.

internal static Single GlobalSpeedMultiplier = 4f;

internal static Single PassiveOwnboatNoiseMultipler = 2f;

internal static Single TorpedoRangeMultiplier = 1f;

The game engine itself uses real figures and formulae, based on declassified statistics and naval academy manuals, to lend the simulation feel to the game. In fact, without these modifiers the game would, essentially, be just another naval sim with a pixel art aethestic! The many variables that offer touchpoints to the simulation, however, let me adjust and dial in what makes for the most fun experience and compensate for some of the unbalancing that using a more action-focused simulation model creates. The result is a game that should feel instantly intuitive to somebody versed in real-world naval tactics without exposing any complexity to players who don't understand how things like sonar work in reality:

The game itself is 'sim-lite' but not for lack of thought put in to the simulation - many thanks to Lt. Cdr Craig M. Payne at the US Naval Institute for the basis of many of the sonar calculations used in the game's deep code.

I'd like to thank my invaluable playtesters, none of whom are simulation afficianados, for their brilliant feedback and continued patience.  Although the initial game was developed in 5 days, I've since built it out with much better Quality of Life based on their experiences, such as the 'time compression' feature that greatly speeds up each individual scenario and means there's little to no 'dead time' waiting for the action.

The game isn't quite where I want it yet - I definitely want to make it less wordy and to provide more options to players to tweak the game to their needs. Unmappable keyboard controls is a bit of a sin for a game I want to be accessible and is definitely up for change as well. Despite that, I feel like it's in a good enough place that I want a wider audience to try the game and get a more statistical view on what sort of things I most need to focus on moving forward.