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Silent Shark

tactical map-based WWII submarine sim

Details

External ID
49277535
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Silent Shark
Website domain
silentshark.app
Launched
Aug. 12, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
79
Upvotes percentile
0.907258064516129
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Updated at
Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.

Description

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 anglesFor 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/4705650The landing page is here => https://silentshark.appI'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.

Enrichment

Theme
interactive simulations and creative experiments
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
Hardware & robotics
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
wwii submarine simulation game
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Silent Shark is a complex historical simulation game featuring realistic naval geometry, bathythermograph thermal layers, hydrophone acoustic propagation, and analog Torpedo Data Computer (TDC) math across desktop platforms.

What it would actually take: Building a naval combat simulator requires a custom game engine setup (such as Unity, Godot, or custom C++/Rust) with specialized algorithms for acoustics, dead reckoning target motion analysis (TMA), and mechanical computer simulation. The hard parts are the domain-specific mathematical modeling of underwater physics and sound channels, manual trigonometric stadimeter calculations, and historical campaign AI balancing. This demands substantial game development experience, historical naval systems domain knowledge, and complex systems architecture.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Silent Hunter III, Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific, Silent Service II, Red Storm Rising

Concerns raised: UI looks AI-generated, verbose, parts don't fit together, Potential use of AI for code without disclosure, Game doesn't promise historical accuracy

Feature requests: Hire someone to polish the UI/visual design, Add disclosed information about AI usage if applicable

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 130 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #15 of 131 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 285 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Horizontal yet.