New Aiming Modes

08/20/2012

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Version 1.3 of Battle Fleet, which is just around the corner, will feature a ton of new updates will will include a new Aiming mode called Angle Assist. This mode addresses the concerns of players who find the aiming very difficult, as well as equalize the playing field for multiplayer games. Angle Assist shows a green line from your selected turret making it easier to set the angle for the shot, but will show fewer range circles around the ship making it more difficult to estimate the distance. 
For players who prefer the old aiming system, you will still be able to play the game with the Distance Assist mode which keeps everything the same. 

Personally I think that the Angle Assist mode is actually a bit more realistic as the real trick to aiming the guns of WW2 warships was getting the distance to your target rather than the direction. Either way, it's a fun change and worth trying out even if you are a veteran player.
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Now Available on the Mac Game Store

07/02/2012

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I'm pleased to announce that Battle Fleet is now available through the Mac Game Store, a really cool independent online game retailer for Macs. Check out their awesome collection of games and help support cool distribution platforms that give Mac users options outside of the Mac App Store.
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Aircraft Carriers

06/28/2012

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The new aircraft carrier feature introduced in v1.21 allows you to launch an airstrike every turn. Each carrier is equipped with 4 flights of fighter bombers. Every turn you can launch a flight and either use it to strike against an enemy ship or put it in air defense mode and protect your carrier.

The Airstrike mode is similar to the Airstrike Command Card that was previously available. When you select an Airstrike you set your target and the angle of the airstrike, which you would use to align with the direction of the ship you are targeting to get maximum effectiveness. The difference is that now enemy ships can defend against airstrikes, so depending on the number of flights they have set on Air Defense and the number of AA guns they have installed, your attacking flight could be shot down and/or damaged. 

The Air Defense mode will give your flight orders to intercept any enemy airstrikes within a radius around your carrier. This doesn't guarantee that it will stop an enemy airstrike but it will at least damage their attacking flight. 

You can also arm your ships with AA guns (during the Turret selection menu) which will automatically fire on attacking aircraft. A combination of AA guns and Air Defense flights will go far to keeping your fleet safe from enemy airstrikes. 
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Getting Started with iOS Development

07/07/2011

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After creating a prototype of the combat system using the game development platform GameSalad, we then moved onto creating the full game in the Unity3D game engine. If you haven't heard of GameSalad yet, it's a great tool for rapid prototyping or even creating full (but simple) 2D iOS games. GameSalad is a completely drag and drop platform (and FREE), so there is no real coding or language you need to learn to use it, which is great if you are new to programming, but not so great if you want to create a more complex game. If you are thinking of getting into iOS programming, definitely give it a shot as it might get you inspired to move onto more sophisticated platforms like Unity, Cocos2D, SIO, UDK, etc...

The reason we decided to use Unity 3D for a 2D game was mainly to get comfortable with the Unity system as we plan to use it for future games which will be designed in a 3D environment. Unity3D is a very flexible system that allows you to easily port your games to additional platforms (Mac, Windows, XBox, Android, etc..), so that fact really appealed to us. There are of course some tradeoffs in not using the Apple iOS SDK directly, for example if you want to add features that are built into the iOS SDK like GameKit (bluetooth & wifi multiplayer) or GameCenter  or the iPhone Camera you have to either buy a 3rd party plugin or really know your way around both Unity and the iOS SDK to make them work together. More on this coming in future posts. 

Questions? Leave a comment below
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The Beginning

06/30/2011

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Picture

"Battle Fleet" grew out of the iOS game review site I run www.iosStrategyGames.com. Although there were some great games on the iOS platform at the time, I felt that the strategy genre was a bit underrepresented. This led to the idea of creating unique strategy games, mainly just so that we had something more rewarding to play than another tower defense game or Angry Birds. Not that there's anything wrong with angry Birds, just not my cup of tea :) 
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