Happy New Year! I want to share something that I've been working on for a while.
The gist of it
After over a year of development, I'm excited to be putting out the first public demo version of my artillery game Tanks! (working title). As of now I've implemented most of the basic features, including most of the weapons and the basic game loop. If you'd like to check it out and give some feedback, the link is here!
Why Tanks?
Artillery games aren't new. As far as I know, they were some of the first games to be programmed on computers, and have remained decently popular up to the present day. Within this genre, some of the most popular titles have been those with destructible terrain. Wendell Hicken's Scorched Earth was likely the first game in this category, though titles such as Blitwise Games's Pocket Tanks, Team17's Worms series, Ethan Nicholas's iOS game iShoot, and 2DPlay's Flash clones Tanks and Big-Battle Tanks later came to occupy the same niche.
As an avid browser gamer, I had the opportunity to play a few of these games in my childhood, and the concept stuck with me. I quite enjoyed the mechanics of aiming projectiles against all the game physics and being able to play with the terrain itself. I've always thought it would be fun to implement my own terrain, weapons, and game mechanics, and I've always wanted more broadly to be able to make a game on my own.
In this context, this “Tanks” project is many things to me. It's a project that I can be proud of. It's a good chance for me to practice programming and software desgin. It's something fun that I can share with the world. And it's a love letter to these small, independent computer games that dominated the late 90's and early 2000's. While I may not have been able to contribute to the golden age of Flash, I hope that I can pay tribute to it when I eventually finish this project.
Plans for the future
I've got a lot on the docker for the future of this project. From this point some of the next steps planned are:
- Improvements to the UI
- More landscapes to battle on
- Battle physics customization
- CPU players and various AI levels
- Music/more sound effects
- Improved sprite graphics
- Single player campaign (stretch goal?)
If this project ever reaches a point where I can consider it “complete”, there's a decent chance that I might release a final version under a shareware model of sorts, where almost all of the game is available for free and maybe a few features are hidden behind a small fee. I'd also like to support anyone who wants to modify the game, but I don't know how easy that would be, seeing as the code is coupled pretty tightly in some places. Who knows? Maybe I'll figure something out.
In any case, I hope you enjoy the demo! If there's any feedback you'd like to give or bugs you'd like to report, do let me know using the feedback form on the game page. Happy New Year!
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