Tank Tomfoolery Announment(?) Devlog

Using heavy influence from tank trouble, a flash game I played too much while in primary school, I came up with the idea to essentially recreate it. It’s a fairly simple game, so I thought it would be a good place to start. I don’t currently have any ideas to change my version of the game to be unique, as I don’t want to have any ideas too far out of my reach. The most major difference will be that my game will use 16-bit-ish pixel art instead of larger scale drawings as featured in tank trouble.

For most (if not all) sprites in my game, I will be making them in Microsoft paint, as I did for my pong assignment. This is because I find this to be the easiest way of getting customisable sprites for free (also because I want to draw more stuff in Microsoft paint). This includes the concept art (see below).

At first, I was going to make an artillery game. Artillery games are games where players take turns arcing shots at each other over a hilly field. Able to move slightly, but with limited fuel, as well as damaging/destroying the terrain. I ultimately decided against this because I thought it would be too hard, and wouldn’t be achievable at my skill level with how much time I have. But the simplicity of tank trouble should make it easy to replicate, I hope.

I’m hoping to match the sounds from the original game. Mainly the cartoony childish nature of those sounds, like how the bullets sound like marbles when they bounce off of a wall, or the popping sound of the bullet leaving the barrel. The sounds bring together the experience of playing tank trouble, so I’m hoping I will be able to recreate it in a way that is similar to the original.

The target audience for this game is non specific, but will mainly focus on kids aged  around 8-14 range, with the understanding that it could also appeal to young adults 18-30. Due to simple controls and simple mechanics, I'm sure that older folk could get in on the fun, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t like it, so I’m leaving them out of the target audience, and will not be making anything with them specifically in mind in the future. The reason I am basing the target audience so young is because that's the age my friends and I found the game to be the most fun. We would play it together before school started, and it was easily one of the most fun things we could do at the time. With this in mind, I think that the perfect target audience for my game would be the same age I was.

Tank tomfoolery, although being a PvP game, is never meant to be overly competitive. It’s like playing a party game, if someone wins it gets brushed off by the start of the next round, and forgotten. Despite this, I can imagine people being protective of their K/D ratio, even in something as silly as tank tomfoolery. To counteract this, I’m not including anything that tracks between matches (mostly because I don’t want to, but this was a perfect segue into the next topic). Simplicity is a core feature of tank trouble, the controls are simple, just using EDSF + Q and IJKLl + Q, the single letter being used to shoot, and the others to rotate and move forward or backward. Combined with simple graphics, mainly consisting of black and white except for the tanks, makes for a fun family friendly game. 

This is an early rendition of the tank sprites, the animation for movement would shift between the two to give the illusion of movement. Sprites I have not drawn yet include the sprites for the shooting animation (bullet moving through barrel, expanding it along the way), and death animation (parts exploding everywhere). 

The sprites are simple, but definitive of either player, I am considering adding more colour to both sprites as they might be hard to see on larger mazes, I will experiment with this to find a good balance between being able to see yourself, and being able to tell that you are in a tank, and not just a blob of colour.

A concept image of a maze the players would fight each other in. 

This will be one of the many mazes in the game, which, as said previously, will be chosen randomly at the start of the round. 

The players will spawn somewhere randomly within the maze, and have to find their way to the other opponent. This will be determined by pre-selected spots shown above in pink (only shown to convey the idea), chosen from an array. The same will happen for the power up spawn locations, shown in red, as with the spawn locations, they are only shown for the purpose of this document. 

During the round, power-ups will spawn somewhere random. Whichever player can get to the power up first will receive a change to their weapon, as dictated by an icon on the power up drop itself. Current power up ideas include an explosive shot, a laser shot, pierce shot, and mini-gun mode. Each of these ideas are from the original game, and should be easy to recreate.

Bibliography / References

https://tanktrouble.com/ The home page of tank trouble, the game I am basing my project off of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game I mentioned artillery games previously, so I thought it would be best to leave a link to the topic.