Show HN: Silent Shark – tactical map-based WWII submarine sim

eepaga 3 days ago 9 commentsRead Article on silentshark.app

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

I posted an early beta of this game a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180924 - May 2026 (45 comments) and today released the full version.

You 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.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

100% Positive

Analyzed from 347 words in the discussion.

Discussion (9 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

marvinblum•5 minutes ago

I bought it a few days ago. Thank you for including native Linux support <3

So far, it's really fun and the tutorial is great! A few things that could be potentially added to the game:

- Crew management (nothing fancy, just a bit, like food management)

- Different kinds of torpedoes (if the US had that, I only know about German submarines)

- Countermeasures (like noise makers)

- Seeing resources (number of torpedoes) on the campaign map

- A better indication whether a ship is sunk or will stay afloat (I resolve and don't know if the ship has been sunk or not)

- And German submarines + campaign of course

magistr4te•about 1 hour ago

The game has quite the AI smell, which I think does it a disservice. The website feels AI designed, the game (transparently) uses AI graphics; it's hard to tell where the line between handcrafted and generated lies. Immediate question that shoots in my mind is: "How much of the game design is just LLM hallucinations?" As someone who's played around with using AI for games too, this makes me not even want to give the game a chance. Which is a shame, because I think the concept is really cool. Its just tainted by something that subconciously signals me that you dont really care much about your creation.

epaga•6 minutes ago

I'd also like to hear what AI smells you are picking up in the game.

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.

colinb•31 minutes ago

Can you explain more please? I recognise some Claude-isms when reading text, and I recall image generators that added more fingers than are usual, but I don’t know what the 2-d graphics on the app home page signify in this respect.

kelsolaar•about 1 hour ago

I did the tutorial, it was good, I think that what would help is maybe have the arrows where people need to look at have some animation, e.g., pulsating scale or colour, something elegant but hard to miss, took a little bit at times to find them.

epaga•4 minutes ago

Thanks for trying it out and for the feedback! I used to have the red arrows be pulsating and got feedback that it felt "too much" and kind of out of place in the game... probably need to find a middle ground.

serious_angel•about 3 hours ago

[flagged]

Neekerer•about 3 hours ago

>This is not art.

Correct, this is a sim game, a genre of game that typically puts data at the forefront and art on the burners.