Show HN: Silent Shark – tactical map-based WWII submarine sim
silentshark.appYou all gave extremely valuable and helpful feedback back then - thank you so much for that. It led to a lot of improvements:
* I reworked the onboarding tutorials multiple times for clarity, adding protections to stop players from shooting themselves in the foot
* I dropped the Comic Sans-reminiscent font and replaced it with Barlow Condensed
* I improved the layout of the dials for all screen sizes to keep players on top of things
* I added an "Angle-on-Bow recognition trainer" for practicing estimates of ship angles
For the full version, I fleshed out a full campaign with radio intelligence, patrol zones, and lots of historical events impacting things like which naval bases still exist, which types of missions are given, and how reliable your torpedoes are. (And just for fun, I added a full cribbage mini-game as well!)
Now, just minutes ago - almost exactly six months after I started development - I fully released Silent Shark on Steam (Windows, macOS, and Linux) and can't wait to see where things go from here. I have lots of ideas that could work well with this more map-centered approach.
The Steam page is here => https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705650
The landing page is here => https://silentshark.app
I'd be really interested in whether you think the onboarding is clear enough now, and if you have related game ideas that might benefit from a more map-based UI.
Correct, this is a sim game, a genre of game that typically puts data at the forefront and art on the burners.
The only AI graphics in the game (as described on Steam) are literally just clean-up jobs of existing historical maps. That is it.
This is very much a hand crafted game. The design is my own - what I heavily used AI for was the coding side of things as well as for creating my own tools for myself to design things like ships, instrument dials, shipping lanes, etc.
I think the UI elements and layout look very similar to how LLMs like to create them. It's hard to describe, but something about the rounded-edge, thick outline buttons equidistantly placed on the side bars, and heavily dependent on tabbed layouts in sub-menus. I'd argue there's parts where menus have too much empty space, which typically hints that a menu hasn't been thought out completely. It's also the most common type of game/dashboard view that LLMs are capable of: canvas in the middle with interactive buttons on the sides.
For an example of an immersive and good looking UI I'd look to something like Sunless Sea. It's a different type of game and is more narrative driven, but it doesn't have any of the more web-like UI qualities.
For Silent Shark, the map being kind of the "protagonist" if you will and then having the trays of buttons or instruments on the side was also kind of the idea in my head from the beginning.
Till now at least from sub sim fans I've heard nearly only praise for the design. But to be fair, most of the more famous submarine sims aren't necessarily known for beautiful clean UI anyways, so it's not like there are high expectations I suppose. :)
I think part of it is the UI/website text: AI tends to be verbose. And the look just feels slightly off, like the parts don't fit together. (I think AIs are better at image generation than at visual UI generation right now.)
You've got a promising product... could you hire someone to polish the UI side?
Yeah. Guess why. Because they parrot what they have seen in training data! Go figure what that implies.
Is creativity itself not a type of confabulation? Putting aside my confusion on what AI smells you're picking up, surely this would be desired in a game.