I just recently got a playdate hoping to have a bit of fun writing some games, and was lucky enough to stumble on this devblog. I've had a lovely time binge reading through your posts over the last week. First I wanted to say thanks for keeping a log of your work and for being so generous in sharing your insights, techniques and ideas. It's fascinating, inspiring and educational in equal measure.
I was frankly astonished to see this game exists on such a niche platform actually; I also grew up with games like silent hunter, aces of the deep, great naval battles, and have a keen interest in the subject; and bizarrely, the ideas I've started working on are on entirely the same subject, albeit controlling an escort rather than a uboat (an omission from previous video games that I thought would be fun to redress). It actually stemmed from the crank, and thinking it would be a good fit to control the bearing of the asdic set as a fun minigame to get used to the API, although that idea has morphed into more of an involved but arcady, top down real time thing.
Anyway it's been fascinating catching up with development, and seeing these ideas so fully realised. Your work on the sea, weather and general first person atmosphere is really astonishing given the limitations of the display and processor, not to mention simple man-hours; But also hugely interesting to see how you've achieved it. Obviously I'm really looking forward to the game, but also just following the continued development!