Tanks - Update #2

I’ve programmed enough to start putting together a gameplay prototype. The prototype is valuable to see if my design is/will be fun to play. I don’t want to invest time and effort into something if it’s boring to play.  

I found the original Tanks n Stuff map online. Tanks and stuff is what I'm basing this prototype on. As part of recreating the map in 3D I've been relearning how to texture paint. I'm going to try some new tools for this, Blender, Affinity, Artflow Studio and Armour Paint. So far it's been a mix of frustration and joy, it’s hard going but i'm enjoying the learning process. I picked up Ableton Live too. I managed to nab it as part of a pre-release sale. I hope to use it to record music and SFX with some Synths I've collected over the last 15 years. I have no idea how it will turn out.

I've not created a YouTube video, that was one of my main goals when i started this. A little out of fear but also because of time. I’ve been trying Blender to Video Edit. It’s been great so far, if I can get over my trepidation I’ll produce some sort of video this month.

As part of my prototyping I’ve been using PolyBrush and Gaia. I've had a copy of Gaia for a while but never got around to using it. I got the chance this week at work, after a day of messing around I managed to create something rather lovely. An island not too dissimilar to Myst, I've got it building for VR, so a potential side project in the future.

Game Updates

The Pill box
It looks like garbage at the moment. It's Ok for a prototype. It took me a while to implement the fire rates as I kept getting confused by coroutines. I love a good coroutine but when you haven’t used them in awhile you can be easily confused. All in all it took about half a day of fiddling to get them to how I wanted. They have a fire stage consisting of  a constant burst of sustained fire, then a reload before firing again.

I’m going to take this code and work it into a shooting class so that any firing gameobject can inherit from it.

The Scene
Not much in the way of scene updates. I’ve tried a few new trees and I’m working on some farm assets in Blender. I've played with Polybrush a little. Extending the ShaderGraph to have more options when blending textures. I’ve tried to hand painting some tiles for materials, but I'm not great at it. The plan is to hand paint  all the models . This will take a while but i’m enjoying the process.

The Tanks
I fixed a few corner cases with boosting, firing and holding. I have some graphical glitches but i'm not too worried about these until i have nailed the final design. The tank code should be pretty robust now but it's not modular, which i need when i put in place the multiplayer.

I realized the controller code I created previously for gamepads was not going to work. It kinda broke when I tried to implement multiplier.  I removed the code, replacing it with something more lightweight. I then discovered Unity would handle the rest for me. This change was so long ago  now I've actually forgotten what I did exactly. I’ll go back to it once I give multiplayer another go.  

I created some new tanks, they might be enemies or different classes, i've not decided yet. The artstyle Is also still up in the air. They are fun to make so they probably won't be the last Tank models.  

I had a quick play with texturing, trying to get a Toy Soldier look but I’m not impressed with the results.  I hope to use Armour Painter and  Blender to paint the tanks.

What’s next?

• Prototype capture the flag game mode  
• Redo the game design document. What’s missing? What’s fun.  
• New Pillbox Model. Make two different types. possible birds nest?
• Clean up the turret model
• Add destruction to objects
• Add particle effect to gunfire and destruction.
• Code a new enemy type of soldier.
• Code grenades, mortar and mines.