HackAddict

We haven't paid much attention to Tank You for a while, but here is a little hint how it went on after the tech demo:

The first thing you will see is that you don't see any tanks, but robots. That will be the most significant change in the game. We made that decision to make the game more fast-paced and to have characters that people can identify with and potentially laugh at better.

If you look closely, you can also see some other changes. The land chunks are not visible at the beginning. Currently, they are still pre-generated, but our goal is to dynamically render them out of the explosion. Also, you can see a background layer where the blown-out chunks used to be.

The robot as we designed it is very simple, JBox2D-wise. It's a solid body, where we added a not strictly mounted head for pure decoration, and most importantly a single wheel, used to move. This way we should be able to instantiate many robots without having to worry about performance.

To have the robot actually stand up we had to play some little tricks with JBox2D. Basically, we set the inertia to a value that essentially preventented the body to tilt. Additionally, we correct its angle on every logic update in the code. Since this would look a bit stiff to have them always stand straight, we adjusted the angle we set according to the velocity - for emaple, the left robot you're seeing ist moving to the right. Getting them to move required setting a motor, a construct brought by JBox2D. The can move quite fast now, without the player losing control. Also we are experimenting with jumping.

The question now ist, can we still talk about "Tank You"? I really liked that name...

Development on Tank You ist on hold at the moment in favour of our new project Dead Men Walking. Maybe we will later talk about why we lost motivation to continue (for now). I personally would like to gain some more experience with the other project and then return to this one.