Blue Water Development Diary

[AzureSkies]

Hello everyone!

I'm pleased to announce the committed development of this new naval strategy game, Blue Water.


[in-game screenshot with UI overlay disabled. Post edited to replace old art]

The name is a reference to the maritime geographical term, "Blue-Water Navy".

It's been a long time since either Sonalysts' Jane's Fleet Command or Eidos Hungary's Battlestations: Midway graced the naval game community, and Blue Water intends to fill the big shoes they left: That of a surface-fleet, real-time naval strategy game.

Set at the end of 1983 in a "Cold War gone hot" scenario, you will take command of NATO and Soviet battlegroups, airbases, submarines and land installations to decide the world's future. You will be able to take command of one vessel at a time and switch between them, or issue orders from a strategic map.

The Soviet and US Navies were very different, however, it is possible to find some ships that had striking similarities in the most important metrics (such as range, type and effectiveness of armament, etc). As such, there's planned to be two different kinds of missions: Symmetric and Asymmetric. In Symmetric maps, roughly equivalent battle groups will be pitted against each other. In Asymmetric, the fleet composition is more broad and better reflects the different doctrines of the two navies.

There will be realistic weapons and ranges, an adjustable "world scale" slider that modifies the range of all weapons and sensors, skirmish and multiplayer modes, and much more. All these features may not be available on the early alpha version of the game, but will be released with free future updates.

On that note, I'm proud to say I'm committed to the old-fashioned, microtransaction-free model of gaming.

But as for now, it is extremely early in development, but with dynamic water interaction and a unique and immersive order/control scheme, it's already looking very promising and I'm very excited to be working on it.

Be sure to check out the development diary and suggestions thread.

Sincerely,
Azure Skies, LLC