For the past couple of months I have been working on a new game project of mine, which will be called Tick, Tank, Boom. It’s a multiplayer arcade tank-shooter, think cute War Thunder as one Reddit user eloquently put it.
Motivation
I’ve had tons of game projects over the years. In fact, I started to learn programming through game development, in Visual Basic 6.0 back in what I think must have been around 2010. Then we moved over to Java and finally C++, before I enrolled in university and started learning web development and Unity. I have never finished a game project before, because as you probably know if you’re also into game development, you either start small and then the ideas just keep coming in until your game is basically a AAA MMORPG which you will never be able to finish; or you start with that vision in mind from the get go. What I wan’t to say is: My game projects have always been way way way too ambitious.
My last game project was supposed to be an RTS, but I realized after months of development, that the challenge in designing RTS games is more in designing good gameplay systems and providing enough content to support them, which takes time. Additionally, I don’t even play RTSs, so I don’t know what I was thinking going into that.
Development
Now, two or three months ago, I have decided to start yet another project, with small ambitions and a small but complete set of features in mind. Using a networking library I had purchased years ago for another project, I got to work and developed the first prototype. Two weeks ago I finished the technical foundations and conducted a playtest, which was fun and taught me things about my own game that I didn’t expect, mainly that it feels way slower than I intended it to at the moment.
Currently, players can host a server or connect to it by providing the IP adress of the host. Then they will all spawn randomly on a currently unfinished map and fight each other in a game of Free For All until one player reaches 30 kills, at which point they win and the round ends.
Players can disable different parts of enemy tanks by hitting the treads or turret, for example, which will make the enemy tank harder to control.
Vision
So, what’s the plan? Tick, Tank, Boom will be an arcade multiplayer-shooter with focus on fun and replayability. Different tanks will support a wide range of playstyles and at release, players will be able to fight on three different maps. There will be at least three different game modes including classics like point-capture (see conquest in the Battlefield series). The game will release on Steam approximately in mid-2023 and feature full steam-integration, including achievements, invites and statistics.
If you’re interested, you can join the official Discord server or follow the project on mastodon.
