Project: "Tank Game"
| Project Started: |
15th March, 2010 |
Last Update: |
14th December, 2010 |
| Project Owner: |
 HitmanN |
Project Members: |
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| Project Type: |
2D turn-based strategy |
Project Progress: |
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One loooong battle
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Posted 2nd Apr 10, by HitmanN
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My cousin (I'll call him 'HHH' for now) visited me again, and we played another game of Tank Game again. This was an interesting game, mainly because after about 6-7 hours, the game was in a relatively stalemate situation. I did consider my situation worsening slowly, but because of my unit choices (mainly Gunships), I was able to do constant quick strikes, to keep the upper Gold Mines in my control. On the other hand, HHH had a bunch of tanks, both Heavy and Combat downstairs, and I had no chance to break in there with my stuff. Aside from couple of Gold Mines switching ownership every once in a while, there wasn't any decisive moves made by either of us. Eventually we gave up playing seriously and just started having fun with the weapons.
Anyways, this was an important discovery. The game progresses simply too slowly, and there's no real incentive to attack after you start hitting unit caps, unless there's reduced resistance. For a while we thought about some solutions, and these are something I'm going to consider implementing (in order of importance, with the latter ones being less likely to be implemented):
1) Repairing with Engineers should cost more. Currently the Engineers repair for mere energy you have available for the unit. The plan is to add a gold cost to repairing, so you can't just take a few hits, retreat, repair, rinse 'n repeat. Every hit to an enemy will be a hit to the player's military's total value. This should make light units more useful too, as a few hits from a Gyro Scout's or Gunship's machinegun can mean a loss of some gold, rather than be a temporary annoyance.
2) Optionally, if the above change is not made, then repairing could be done with expensive stationary repair facilities, instead of engineers, so you can't very easily bring repair services with you in battle, also giving their location more importance.
3) A turn limit to the game, and if there's no winner by then, statistics are compared and the winner is declared depending on values such as gathered gold, lost units, damage dealt, etc. In other words, you can win a game by playing efficiently, even if you don't capture an enemy factory.
4) Capturable objectives that generate points, and enough points will win you the game. This is an idea HHH didn't particularly like, and I suppose it just might deviate from the originally intended game progression design a bit too much, but it's an alternative worth exploring if the above changes do not affect the progression enough.
5) Energy system is changed from current to all units having full energy at the start of the turn. This would make defending less beneficial as you can't just store up energy and then go on offensive. Unfortunately, it takes away one of the things that were meant to be interesting; how much energy do you use and where.
No particularly critical bugs were found, but some annoyances:
- Gunships were able to move cheaper by tapping the movement keys, as they slide for a while even after not pressing any keys. Since I used Gunships a lot, this annoyed HHH a lot. ;p
- On the other hand, I had majorly bad luck with Missile Jammers. On average missile jammers on Gunships should block 2/3 of missiles. I lost two jammed Gunships before the first succesful jammer block. I think I might just add a tiny bit better blocking chance to the jammers. Maybe 5% or so. Certainly it's still luck-based, but it's one of the only things in the game which is completely luck-based. A 100% block would be too efficient though, and would make anti-air missiles useless, since their primary use is against Gunships.
- After about halfway to the game, the screen stopped following ammo when fired. Just a matter of finding what's causing it. Shouldn't be a biggie since I have all scrolling related stuff in a bunch of events. Probably a flag somewhere is left on or off when it shouldn't. :3
- Framerate dropped a bit once unit caps started to be full, particularly with turrets/infantry, which have lots of line-of-sight stuff going on most of the time. >_< Still need to see if I can drop a loop or two from somewhere. Game was still playable for the entire time though.
Other than that, absolutely great game and lots of fun. Map size seems to be pretty good now too. There are now also randomly spawning crates that can contain gold, repair the unit that picks it up, provide a random unit for the next turn (really small chance. We picked tens of crates and only had two of these.), or be a boobytrap. The boobytraps were particularly uneventful. The only time I lost a unit because of a boobytrap, was a unit that would've died from falling down from upstairs anyways. I'd say HHH got a few more gold crates than I did, but as we got to see, it didn't change the course of the game noticeably. I'll just tweak the ratios a bit and it should be fine as is.
Yup, that's about it in a nutshell. I'll be working on fixing these bugs, working on the progression and adding a few new abilities for units, maybe a weapon or two. Then I think we have enough stuff for a first release. I still need to make a menu though, but that shouldn't take but an evening or two if I keep it simple enough.
I've promised to work on another project this month though, so I may have slightly less time to work on this, but we're definitely not far now. I'll probably let a few more people playtest this before public release, but more about that later. Don't annoy me too much (but show some interest  ) and maybe I'll let you play Tank Game earlier than the rest. 
The attached two screenshots are of a bunch of my Gunships working on HHH's Bazooka Bunker in front of a gold mine, and the second is of HHH's stuff downstairs, plus a crate in a very annoying place (where one spawned two more times during the same game even. Stupid crate spawns. xP).
(Hmm.. the build menu still says 'Weapons' in the title. Need to change that for the factory... xP)
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Be sure to reserve at least a few hours though, the game will probably always drag a bit once the inital gold rush is over. ;P