I’d Like to start off by saying, that I seriously considered calling my game Tuna Sandwich and still think it would be a hilarious idea. However, X-SPLODE-ZONE: Clash of the Shiny Plastic Death Tanks is a fast paced, top down, spastic shooting, tank game and has nothing to do with tuna or sandwiches so the other name did not stick. Starting out I had a grand scheme of ideas to make the most awesome tank fighter game in the world. Unfortunately I didn’t have a huge development team like activision or ubisoft to back me up with my wild ideas. So I had to settle for making the Seventh most Awesome Tank Game Ever made.
The first prototypes were built in 2D to keep the gameplay and graphics simple and easy to iterate on quickly. Using power of the Vector2D class in xna I got a nice natural tank motion out of LERPing the tank direction with the joystick input. I soon had a working prototype with multiple tanks and projectile capabilities. Because I had a larger vision for the future, I kept everything modular so i could easily swap values in and out. But mostly, I kept stuff variable so I could make the switch to 3D.
3D Was my biggest challenge and most time consuming aspect of my project and where I ran into the most problems. It took several tries to get the models oriented correctly. Because My game was using 2D information for collisions and movement I was forced to orient along the XY plane. Because of this I ended up using negative Z up for my models when building them in Maya. Which was kind of confusing when moving around the camera in Maya. It took me a week or so to figure out how to add textures to my models in game as well, which was not helped by the fact that I have never really learned UV unwrapping. But I was able to teach myself what I needed to know and move on.
My next Big problem came when I wanted to add particle effects, I found that they were batch controlled and texture values for any sprite could over ride info for the others. Thus I limited myself to two textures for my effects and created variance by adjusting tint and opacity. In the end I was able to create some nice soft particle effects that really added to the explosions and feel of the game.
I’d like to say I did everything in this game myself, but I Have to give props to my good buddy, Rick Gilliland. He came to me one day after dinner and said “I wanna add Depth map Shadows to your game.” How could I refuse such a generous offer, so we struggled to figure out the math and four hours later we had some sexy depth map shadows in game. Thanks Rick you’re the best.
After that most of my time was consumed with modeling the area for my tank battle. It took many days, but came out looking pretty fantastic. I slapped in some royalty free music from http://freeplaymusic.com/ which helped players get pumped for the action and made the game experience more entertaining. I was lucky to find some hilariously awful elevator music which I placed in my pause menu to make interruptions in the game very comical. A few menus later I had a polished game which is quite fun to play.
An all round success, I was very pleased with my work. I’ve had lots of fun dominating my teacher and friends in my own game, and they didn’t mind losing to much because they enjoyed the experience so much.
Why Was my game only the Seventh best tank game ever? Well because of the limited time I was only able to build one level to play on, I had two other awesomely epic levels planned out that I didn’t get around to making. I also didn’t have time to give the players the ability to choose from multiple vehicles with different strengths and weaknesses, but that would have required quite a bit of balancing and was simply not practical for a class project like this. There was nothing really wrong with my game, Just some places where I could have gone farther to make it even more awesome.
It was nice to work by myself and have full creative control on my project, but It would have been nice to work in a group and be able to collaborate and make something even larger, while being able to focus more closely on one aspect of the games design. But I know I’ll be forced to do that once i enter the industry so I guess I’ll just be thankful for the opportunity to wear every hat on the design team.