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[NiallM]

I think you could make the game without powerups slightly more interesting. when you get into a shooting match with another player, it seems like it is just a matter of hammering the gun button. Maybe I am missing something here though, but it felt like there wasn't much evasion built into the game. The boost powerup provides a bit of this evasion feeling, in addition to the fact that it is really nice to just boost around the board, and pop off little shots.

Yeah, I think the lack of evasion (or at least being able to defend yourself somehow) is a bit of a problem. And it gets particularly bad when things get really bullet hell-y. I've been trying to think of ways to fix this, but it may require some more fundamental changes to the game than what I've tried so far.

The behavior of the powerups was a bit unclear. What is a bee mine?

Most of the mine pickups affect what happens when you collide with a mine. The bee mine is pretty obvious if you do that. Also, some of these mine pickups can be advantageous, so in some circumstances you might want to collide with mines and take some damage in exchange for what they add to the playfield.

Also the fact that the powerups seem to stack infinitely, there never seems like a reason to not go for a powerup. What if you could only hold the last 2 powerups on the stack. Again, I maybe missing something here, and that is already the behavior, in which case maybe that should just be explained visually. I guess there are some situations in which your tank becomes so powerful that you just kill yourself.

Yeah, the pickups are supposed to stack infinitely (or at least until you've exhausted all the pickups in the game). And I think that's part of the problem with the game. I'm still trying to figure out the best way around the whole so-many-modifiers-that-suicide-is-inevitable issue, because I really like the chaos all those interactions bring. It's just that survival comes down to a roll of the dice after a certain point.

I think I might experiment with limiting the number of active pickups, see how that works.

Have you played inside a star filled sky? it really pushes the decisions about what powerups you need to grab, while also having a visual language that shows what the powerups do.

I've not actually. I'll have to check it out. Though I'm a bit apprehensive about the idea of drawing up icons for all 36 (I'm aiming for 64, I think) modifiers that are currently in the game.


Anyway, here's my WIP build (Windows). In this one you get healed 20% whenever you grab a pickup, and it adds Turn-based mode, zombie shots, mine shots, kamikaze tanks, and camouflage mines modifiers. Not sure how well turn-based mode works...

[jonbro]

I may be going to far with this, but I had some more thoughts about the game.

I think that there are some oppositional goals here. On the one hand, you want to add all these ops to the system that add up to really interesting bullet displays. This is already awesome, and I think you are accomplishing it really well. It already feels like a really rich space, full of surprises. At the same time, you want to have player avatars that need to avoid these bullets in some way. I am not sure that this goal is as well defined. I think there are a few ways you can fix it though. One of them is the bullet and player movement is not well balanced. If you look at bullet hell games, the bullets actually move really slowly, and the player can move in any direction at any time (i.e. no steering). I can see you are accomplishing aiming with the tank style controls, but perhaps a dual stick control is a better setup? That said, the powerups tend to stack towrds omnidirectional shooting pretty darn quick, so maybe the shooting control isn't that important. You could have just shooting in the movement direction. Another thing that you could borrow from bullet hells is the possibility that your player can destroy bullets. In a bunch of games this manifests as a last ditch style bomb, but I think in your game you could have bullets that destroy other bullets. I think there are some powerups that do this (the shock wave?), but perhaps as a top level thing.

What if your bullets moved really slow, like slower than your ship moved, so you were not only manuvering to get your bullets on the other player, or create an impassable maze for them, but you had to also navigate your own maze. This could work well with auto fire. Or if you could control your ships bullet op stack, like pop instructions, or shift instructions, and push instructions by picking them up off the board.

Another possibility... how would the game change if the tanks couldn't kill each other directly, and instead needed to hold a changing point on the map by pumping bullets into it... then you could have a risk reward of staying to hold the point vs going to get more powerups. Or if you needed to kill creeps that moved across the map, and rather that dying from getting shot, you lost the creeps you had collected?

[Belimoth]

This is fun

[NiallM]

I've just uploaded a new, slightly Christmas-themed update. It adds various new pickups (turn-based mode, zombies, turrets, snowflakes), but the main addition is a separate Tank You 'n' Stuff version:



Modelled after an old Amiga game called Tanx 'n' Stuff, the winner is the player who has grabbed the most flags at the end of 5 minutes. It required a much larger arena to work, so each player gets a separate viewport now. Tanks can carry 3 flags at a time, and only flags which have been deposited in the player's base count towards their final score. (also, you can steal flags out of other players' bases, which is always fun )

Dying now is just a momentary frustration rather than game over. I think this possibly makes the game work better?

Here's a video.