Warwake

What it is

Built around three things. Stubbornly not much else.

01
Direct control of WWII warships

You drive the ship. Rudder, throttle, turret traverse, the long lag between giving an order and the hull actually answering it. Not a menu with a battle happening somewhere behind it.
02
Fleet coordination and large-scale battles

One ship is a duel. A line of them is a problem. The interesting part of naval warfare is what happens when several hulls have to move as one thing and someone gets it wrong.
03
Fast, cinematic — without losing the weight

Shells take time to arrive. Ships take time to turn. Everything else should be quick: get in, get shooting, get a result. Weight where it earns its keep, speed everywhere else.

Where it actually is

Very early. On purpose, said out loud.

Right now it’s one class of ship, one ocean, and making the main guns feel good. Ships steam, turrets train, shells land. Almost everything else is placeholder and most of it will be rebuilt at least once.

Rather than disappearing for a year and coming back with a finished game, this gets documented from the beginning — what works, what doesn't, and what had to be thrown away. If you want to argue with a design decision, the earlier the better.

Argue with me on r/Warwake

Status: Prototype / vertical slice
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Team: One person
Platform: PC — target
Playable build: Not yet
Steam page: Not yet
Dev log: Running

In engine

It runs. That's the whole claim.

Everything in this block is captured out of Unreal, not rendered offline. It's rough, most of it is placeholder, and the UI barely exists — but the ships move, the guns fire, and the water knows they're there.

Battleship under way at sunset with a shell splash rising off the port bow — 01 Straddled at sunset. The splash on the left is a miss — barely.

Battleship firing while transiting a fjord at dusk — 02 Firing on the move through a fjord. Smoke drifts downwind, not sideways.

Broadside view of a battleship with anti-aircraft fire and funnel smoke — 03 Broadside, secondaries up. Everything you see here gets rebuilt.

Battleship firing its main guns near a mountainous coastline — 04 Main battery going off. Getting this to feel heavy is the current job.

Tactical plot overlay showing ship tracks — 05 First pass at the tactical plot — where fleet orders will be given.

Under the paint

The hull, before it got wet.

These three are offline Blender renders from the modelling pipeline — not gameplay. Included because the asset work is where most of the hours went, and it's easier to judge a hull in flat light.