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[Vino]

Hi TIGSource.

Since I found these neat forums I figure I'd start syndicating the Digitanks blog into a thread here so that you guys can keep up to date with what's going on. For those of you who haven't heard yet, Digitanks is a turn-based artillery strategy game. Here's the most recent in-development video:





And a screenshot:



(Sorry for breaking the tables, I don't have a smaller version.)

Here's today's new article, visit the Digitanks website to read more.

Studying real-world battle tactics isn’t something I do a lot, and by no means am I any kind of expert on the subject, but I do enjoy to read about the topic and watch documentaries about warfare. It’s a great way to waste time under the pretenses that I’m learning something that might actually one day be completely useless to know. Actually that’s a bit harsh, when I was in high school I used to complain that all of those AP Physics and Calculus courses I took would never be used in the “real world” and now here I am developing video games and applying those Physics and Calculus concepts on a daily basis, so maybe I should learn tank warfare tactics in more depth, in preparation for my starring role as World War 3’s greatest tank commander. Following in the footsteps of Rommel and Patton, I’ll redefine what tank warfare means and singlehandedly win the greatest war humanity has ever known!

Or I’ll just use the concepts to design a fun artillery game. I think we’ll go with option number 2.

So these Military Channel documentaries about tank warfare are pretty neat, but they really only cover warfare from a strategic, high-level point of view. Very rarely do they ever go into the nitty gritty tactics of tank warfare. While I knew the basic pros and cons of the tank versus the infantry, I still had never learned before now why exactly tanks became of such a strategic importance on the battlefield and how they play such a vital role in modern military conflicts. So, I went to the best place to learn about such things, which of course is Wikipedia. Here’s what I learned.

To understand why tanks are so important to modern warfare, I’m going to take you all the way back to the ancient Romans. Warfare is of course as old as mankind itself, and in the beginning stages, the basic strategy of warfare was “get a bunch of guys together and go kick the shit out of those other guys over there.” I’m sure that was the basic tactic for thousands of years, until the Romans came along and introduced organization. Battle of <br /<Cannae The incredibly organized and disciplined Roman legions could take on forces much greater in size than their own, since they formed organized units with columns of incredible killing efficiency. The Romans specialized in a new type of warfare that involved creating big lines of men that were difficult to attack from the front. I’m no war historian, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I think it’s safe to say that the Romans developed the idea of “battle lines.” These lines had incredible defensive power, and since they were so difficult to defeat, they managed to conquer the entire known world at the time.

Now, the graphic I chose to accompany this article is actually rather ironic, because it’s from the Battle of Cannae against Hannibal and the Carthaginians, which is the first major battle that the Romans lost. They lost it because Hannibal exploited a weakness in the Roman’s organizational system, letting the Romans advance and enveloping their flanks until the Romans found themselves surrounded. It’s the first recorded instance of the use of a “pincer” movement. But in any case…

This is the way warfare was for many thousands of years, with the two sides lining up on the battlefield and facing each other, lobbing cannons at each other and generally trying to kill each other. Sounds like an honorable way to die, nobly facing your enemy. Fast forward to World War 1 and the 1910’s. At this point we had gone past the spears and archers of the Romans and developed rifles which were accurate many hundreds of yards away. It was no longer prudent to line up facing the enemy on a battlefield because the enemy would just shoot you. That kind of thing had died with the American civil war, and with the advent of rifled barrels. So now the thing was to dig trenches in the ground in order to provide yourself cover. Each side would dig a trench at their battle line, and these trenches would provide the soldiers incredible defensiveness to the attacks of their enemies. It’s hard to shoot someone who’s protected by a couple yards of dirt. Just like what happened with the Romans two thousand years prior, once again we have a superior defensive ability revolutionizing the way wars are fought. It’s so much easier to be defensive than it is to be offensive, since you can just pile on another layer of protection, but developing a new weapon that can be safely and efficiently wielded on a battlefield is far more difficult.

So the Germans and the English sat in their trenches, each having a very high defensive position, and played a game of trying to attack the other side. That meant leaving your heavily fortified trench and running out over an open, war-scarred field in an attempt to reach the other guy’s trench so that you could gain a couple of yards. It made no sense! Warfare had gotten so incredibly defensive that the costs for attacking were just way too high. New weapons needed to be developed with enough offensive power to overtake the trenches. Enter TANKS!

Tanks are mobile weapon platforms. They’re really just a big cannon on wheels with armor. They work because they help attackers to punch through a defensive line, mitigating some of the defensive advantages that the defenders have given themselves. With enough of this mobile artillery, attackers can create a hole in the enemy’s line, and then by pushing more tanks and infantry through that hole, they can widen it and advance on their ultimate targets.

Tanks aren’t magical war-wands though. You can’t hold down a battle line with tanks. They need infantry to support them, or they’ll become targets. They need to be manned with humans, and humans have needs other than killing, so if tanks run too far ahead of their supply lines their human occupants won’t be able to do things like eat, much less restock their armaments. They’re also expensive to produce, so you don’t see them in great numbers. As such, there typically aren’t enough tanks to cover the entire battle front, and spreading the tanks out too thin is a great way to ensure that they’re overwhelmed easily, so they need to be concentrated to have an effect. So, one of the main aspects of tank warfare is the intelligence and information aspect — where are the enemy’s tanks? You don’t want to attack the point in the enemy’s line where their tanks are, lest their tanks provide support to the infantry there. When the Allies landed in France in World War 2, they launched a massive intelligence campaign designed to fool Hitler into thinking that they intended to land at Calais, when in fact they landed at Normandy. As a result, Hitler stationed his tanks at Calais, where they were not present for the actual landing. If they had been at Normandy during the landing, the Allies may have failed their landing. A similar situation happened with Patton’s forces in the landing in Sicily, where Allied intelligence fooled Hitler into placing his tanks in Greece, instead of the actual Italian landing location.

Now oftentimes when I’m trying to develop gameplay mechanics, rather than thinking up things that are new and avant-garde I simply find another already existing and fun mechanic, and imitate it. Yeah, I’m a ripoff. Before you judge me though, bear in mind that the vast majority of games are in fact just ripoffs of other games, except maybe for one or two core mechanics that make then unique. Digitanks already has these mechanics, so I’m not looking to invent anything new, because while “new” is good, too much “new” is a recipe for failure. In any case, if I’m going to rip off an already existing mechanic for gameplay, why not rip off actual war? Men have spent their entire lives and written volumes in this complicated endeavor, and if I can capture a simplified version of it then it can maybe be pretty fun.

So, I decided to distill the game into a small number of basic elements. (I like to break down problems into smaller ones to make them easier to solve.) Tank warfare involves:prototype8

    * Highly defensive, mostly stationary infantry elements
    * Highly mobile and offensive tank elements
    * Supply lines which must remain unbroken

So, I built my units and game mechanics with this in mind.

Mechanized Infantry – These units can fortify to increase their defensive position. They can be used to defend key areas and create a “front.” Once fortified, attacking them from the front becomes difficult and overwhelming force must be used, but they’re still vulnerable from the sides.

Main Battle Tank – These are mobile, strong offensive units which are difficult to produce, but pack a real punch. A single Main Battle Tank can’t punch through enemy lines alone, but a coordinated attack can make a hole large enough to compromise even the strongest enemy position.

Supply Lines – The closer you are to your base, the stronger your units become. Venturing far into the depths of the unknown stretches your supplies thin, and is a great way to be picked off easily. However, if the risk of leaving your supplies behind is outweighed by the benefit of a surprise attack, it can turn into an advantage.

The idea is that players will balance these three elements while growing their base and finding the weak spots in their opponents defensive positions. Once these mechanics have been solidified, I plan to add bonus units such as artillery and air support, which can help to soften an enemy position, making it easier for the tanks to move in.

Now I just know that as you read this article you had ideas and want to make suggestions to me. Well, I would love to hear your thoughts! So please email me and tell me all about how my ideas suck and/or are awesome.

[Vino]

Hi TIGSource. Here's the latest news from the Digitanks website. Sorry there's no screenshots or videos, next time!



Lately I’ve been feeling like I have way to many things to do and not enough time in the day, so at the risk of sounding like a middle manager rife with meaningless anecdotes about synergizing with improved productivity, for this edition of the Digitanks development journal I thought I’d share with you how I keep my sanity in three easy steps. My past week has been spent just refining existing gameplay so there’s not much game-wise to post about, so read on to learn about my patented method of attacking problem solving.

Simplify

You’ve been working all day. You’re tired. You have one more thing you need to do before you go home, but it’s a monster. It’s huge and complicated and you can’t fit it all in your head. You have no idea how you’re going to even approach the idea of solving this problem, and you don’t know where to start. You need to simplify.

As I’ve covered in previous articles (I think?) any problem can be broken down into a number of smaller steps. Once you get the problem down to a series of bite-sized steps, it suddenly looks like a piece of cake. It gives you a starting point, and it helps you stay motivated since you’re only having to attack one small task at a time, and you no longer have to look at the bigger picture.

When I began working on Digitanks, it seemed like a huge undertaking. So much stuff to do! So I sat down with a piece of paper and wrote out all of the individual parts of the program that I would need to tackle.

    * Application framework
    * Tanks shooting and dying
    * Base building
    * Multiplayer code
    * Units

and so on. Each task takes in the order of one or two weeks to complete. Then when I begin each task I break that up into smaller tasks. How many structures will I need? What new structural code will I need to write? How long will designing the gameplay take? I make a list of tasks that I’ll need to do for that features to be complete. Now the work is as good as done, I only need to go down the list and do each thing.

You can also conceptually simplify a problem. I spend a bit of time each day (usually in the morning just after I wake up, or in the shower) reflecting and thinking about the problems I have to face on that day. Oftentimes  just thinking about a problem can reveal its inner simplicity. Like Cesar Millan says, life is really very simple, but people tend to complicate things. (Cesar’s my hero by the way, my dog is well trained and behaves thanks to all the stuff I learned from his show.)

A while ago I had a problem with one of the libraries I use to render text to the screen. At some point if I was drawing too much text, the library would start crashing, because it had too many file pointers open to the same font on the disc. It was affecting both Digitanks and SMAK, (they use the same UI library) but Digitanks was affected even more since it can draw a great deal more text at any time. I was at a total loss of how to solve this, since it happened deep in the bowels of a support library that I didn’t understand. I ignored the problem for a while (ignoring a problem in hopes that it goes away can be a fairly effective way of solving the problem, sometimes — just don’t try it with your bills) until the day that I realized the problem was really very simple. I was opening one font for every bit of text I wanted to draw, instead of opening one global font object and using it for all of the text. It ended up being a 10 minute fix once I realized what the real problem was. But, rather than bang my head against the keyboard for hours or days, I just let the problem stew in the back of my mind until the inner simplicity became apparent.
Organize

Organization once conquered the world. It’s a fact. I’m talking about the Romans. Many problems present themselves because of lack of organization. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to go in and rip out a bunch of code that was just too messy, due to not having been properly thought out ahead of time. After I think of a better way to organize that code, typically the number of lines of code gets reduced by half or more.

One of the bits of feedback I received from playtesters was that lack of camera control was a major drawback. So, some time after the last demo, I put in some basic camera controls, where clicking on a piece of terrain would move the camera there and using the scrollwheel could zoom in and out. Over time though, the camera code became a mess, it was scattered all over the place. It was very difficult to debug or change something. Eventually I said enough is enough, and I created a “camera class” which was a single, centralized place for all camera-related programming to remain. Then, when an important event happens that requires the camera to be centered, it calls into the camera class to center the camera at that spot, and the camera class handles all of the specifics. Now all of my camera-related code is in one place, it’s very organized.

I tend to be a neat person. I really don’t have many belongings, just my laptop, some musical equipment and a futon for sleeping on. So my floors are always clear, tables don’t accrue oddities, because I have no problem throwing things away with they’re no longer needed. When it comes to my desk though, it will tend to accumulate crap. I’m typically engrossed in my work, and I don’t like to have to tear my attention away to do other things, so they get piled up on my desk with a promise to take care of them “later.” Of course, “later” never comes, and the piles continue to grow higher until the moment that I say “enough is enough” and turn my attention to reducing them. Here’s where organizing comes in. Some things go in the trash pile, some things go in the “file pile” to be put in cold storage in a filing cabinet and hopefully never seen again, and some things go in the “need my attention” pile. Then, after everything’s taken care of, my desk is clear and organized with everything in its place — this is typically the period where I’m the most productive.

Now it is possible to be too organized. In my last post I talked about how the Romans lost the battle of Cannae. The reason for this is that the Carthaginians knew about the Roman’s organization and exploited it. They knew that the Romans would advance in their tightly knit columns, carefully monitored by the now-predictable generals whose strategy was to advance until the enemy was obliterated. So, the Carthaginians allowed them to advance, slowly retreating the center of their lines, but leaving their flanks to envelop the sides of the enemy force until the Romans found themselves surrounded. They were so organized that they had forgotten to be agile enough to respond to new circumstances.

I worked once at a company that was about three programmers. They decided to implement a new all-in-one project-management, issue-tracking, and time management software system. The problem was, there was only three of us. There weren’t hardly enough people to actually merit using all of these complicated procedures. It was eating up more time in the updating of the system than it was saving in organization benefits. We were all three in the same room, if we wanted to know the status of an issue we could lean over our shoulder and say, “Hey John, what’s the status of the menu bug?” and John would reply, “Oh I fixed it a couple hours ago.” In an organization of 30 or 300 people, you need sophisticated software to handle that, but with just three people, we became a slave to the process of updating the software, and actual work ended up suffering.
Prioritize

So now you have your organized list of simple problems, just waiting to be solved. Problem is, there’s about ten thousand of them. If you’re like me, for any project of nontrivial size, you have a list ten miles long of things remaining to do, many of which you’ll likely never have time to complete within the time allotted for yourself. You need to prioritize.

Many tasks can be put into one of two categories. It can be the kind of task that nets you 80% of the gain for 20% of the work, or it can be the kind of task that can net you 20% gain for 80% of the work. I call the latter “polish work” and the former “fantastic.” In the excitement that’s associated with any project, it’s really easy to get caught up in the latter, especially if you have the kind of workhorse personality that I do. Artists tend to polish something to a fault. It’s never perfect, and you can always tweak and tweak and tweak ad infinitum. Ten hours later, you realize you wasted the entire day on a model of a dirty shoe when your main character is still a big box.

Every day before I start work, I take a look at all of the things that Digitanks needs, and I work on the parts that are the most sorely lacking. For instance, at the moment a lot of people have been mentioning that they’re frustrated by the lack of movement in Digitanks. This is kind of strange to me since in many turn-based games the movement per-turn is very limited. In Civilization, the first units the player gets can only be moved one tile per turn, but nobody complains. I increased the movement radius, in fact I almost doubled it, but that didn’t really solve the problem. I think the reason that people are bothered is that in Digitanks there’s no tile grid, so players take movement for granted. The game looks more like StarCraft, and players expect to be able to move wherever they want. That’s my biggest problem, so it’s what I’m focusing my time on right now. My solution is a pretty simple one, if you click to move outside of the tank’s movement radius, the game will remember that and automatically move that tank over the next couple of turns until it gets to the location the player clicked. Now, there’s another issue that I have yet to deal with, which is that the top of my tank’s turrets look BORING! They need something to spice them up and make them look less plain. But it wouldn’t be a very good use of my time to work on that when the structures are still large boxes, so I put it at the bottom of my priorities list.

The way to get everything done that you need to do is to prioritize which items are most important, and do those first. You may not get to the things on the bottom of the list, but you can sleep well knowing that you made the most impact you could.

[Vino]

Hey TIGSource. Nobody seems to care about Digitanks too much, which is a shame, but I will soldier on posting about it here because it's your loss if you don't at least take a look. If you want to read it straight from the horse's mouth, you should visit the Digitanks website. If you don't visit then I take no responsibility for any emotional trauma you may endure. If you do visit, I still take no responsibility for any emotional trauma, but I may attempt to provide my deepest condolences to you in the form of TIG-patented Human Hug in the unlikely event that you should experience any of the aforementioned emotional trauma. That is all.



Today’s update brings a new screenshot from Digitanks-land. Sorry to break the frames.



Featured in this new shot is are the new CPU and buffer models. A long time friend of mine, Adam, is helping design and construct the models. These designs are still in progress, we’re trying to work out the details on how we want them to look, so the textures and geometry of them are far from finalized. But, they should give a rough idea of what the end result will look like. There’s a chain of buffers leading up to that small gray box, which is placeholder art for a resource node. The blue circular object right next to it is a resource collector that the player is trying to construct. The yellow tank on the right has decided to attack, and I’ve responded with some tanks of my own. The large blue tendrils coming out from all of the structures is the player’s “Network.” It defines the player’s territory and helps support friendly units. In the future, I’m going to write a blog post detailing how we came to the design decisions that we did concerning the structure models, but for today it’s just a screenshot.

I spent most of the past few days revamping the tutorial. My previous goal for the tutorial was that the player could learn the game as he was playing. This is pretty common in first person shooters, and that’s where my previous experience comes from. However, it’s just not realistic in a turn-based strategy game. Civilization IV, for example, has Sid Meier personally teaching the player the basics of Civ, and the new Red Alert 3 has special tutorial missions that instruct the player before he even gets into the game proper. It’s a noble goal to not require the player to play a tutorial, but I think it’s standard practice in a technical and strategic game like Digitanks, and limiting myself in that way was starting to detract from the player’s experience, since the in-game tutorial lacked sufficiency to cover all of the required topics. So, I decided that my approach about it was all wrong, especially when a couple people (you know who you are, thanks!) wrote me telling me about how it was wrong, all wrong. The new tutorial is much better. It removes the player from having to learn under pressure, and hand-holds the player through the process of moving, aiming, turning, promoting, and setting the energy for a tank, and has him kill an enemy tank for practice. It’s so easy, that my mom (notorious non video game player) completed the tutorial with only minor difficulty. This tutorial is so easy that I think that my dog could be trained to complete it, if he had opposable thumbs and could operate a mouse. So, my next goal is to get an equally easy tutorial that teaches the player the base building mechanics. That’s going to be a bit more of a challenge, but I’ve already finished the first draft so all it really needs now is some good playtesting.

Adam, like I mentioned before, is helping with some of the artwork. He’s pretty keen and he’s a great guy, and his help is allowing me to focus more on the design of the game. My role as the “Facilitator of Fun” is playing the game, figuring out what the most un-fun part of it is, fixing it, and playing the game again, ad nauseum. I mean that quite literally, it’s beginning to be a bit of a drag. A week and a half ago the game was completely not fun, and slowly I’ve been wrestling small inklings of fun into it. There’s a fun game in here somewhere and I just need to chip away at the stone until its true form emerges. Some of the problems are systemic and cause me to re-evaluate the way I think about the design of the game, but the majority of the problems are either minor playability issues, a multitude of which must be waded through as if I were swimming through a game development quagmire, or else AI problems. It’s funny how many problems in gameplay stem from the bots that control the computer opponents — if they don’t behave in a reasonable way, the player stops having fun. After all, a bot that simply lets you roll over his base with no questions asked isn’t very fun. You could say I underestimated the amount of time I scheduled for myself to design fun gameplay at the onset of this project, but really I underestimated how hard it would be to make convincing AI’s. They don’t even have to act the way humans do, so long as they provide an appropriate challenge. That is in itself a challenge for me, so Adam’s work is immensely helpful in allowing me to concentrate on it.

In any case, being so hard at work as I am, I’m planning on releasing another demo in near future that will showcase the new base-building aspects of the game. I’m also getting closer to creating a feedback system for the website. Thanks for following Digitanks development and thanks for your patience!

[mokesmoe]

Nobody posting doesn't mean nobody cares. I read every post in the devlogs sub-forum, but I don't post "This looks cool." in every thread because that would be stupid.
If you post it, people will read and enjoy it.
Some people might be turned off be the wall of text. Not the point.

[Vino]

Ah, thanks. I will continue to post things then. Sorry about the wall of text, I'm really just copying my dev blog from the website into here. I love to hear people commenting on my posts and telling me what they think.

[compositeredfox]

Just a quick first glance feedback:
#1. This looks cool.
#2. I passed the wall of text. Instead of copying your dev blog, IMHO you should write generally and with quick updates here, and write more thoroughly in your blog. If people get interested here in what you're doing they can find out more about it in your site.
#3. The screenshots (at least in the first post) don't do justice to your game (from what I've seen in the video). Maybe you should post a few more (smaller images, more zoomed out) to give a better idea of how the game looks.
#4. This looks cool.

[Vino]

Hmm. Okay. Every site is a little bit different in the kind of content that they want, so sometimes I have trouble tailoring it for what one particular site needs. Thanks, I'll try to take that in mind for my future updates.

Also the more I see that screenshot that I posted in the first post, the more I hate it.

[Vino]

Here's a video of the new base building stuff in action:





Is there a way to embed in these forums?

[compositeredfox]

Looking great. I wanna play it!

[Vino]

New screenshot

New blog post

Same old awesome.

[deathtotheweird]

Nobody seems to care about Digitanks too much

not true.


devlogs usually get less comments than feedback threads because..they are devlogs. I usually go through and read all of them, sometimes I comment but most of the time I don't. People are reading, keep posting! It's always cool to read progress on games.

[Vino]

Thanks, I do intend to keep posting. For example, I am currently making this post.

[Vino]

I posted a beta of the demo over in the feedback forum. It has the base-building stuff in it. Nobody's said anything yet so if someone here hasn't seen it yet I'd appreciate you giving it a shot and letting me know if it sucks or not.

[Vino]

Okay demo's up now.

There's also a new forum for those interested in such things and in case you hadn't noticed them before there is a Steam group and Facebook group for Digitanks.

[Melly]

This looks cool!

[Vino]

Thanks!

I just put up a short new blog post with some screenshots from fans.

[Vino]

Been a while since I posted but I do have an update which contains a screenshot of a new feature and the latest build of the game.

[Vino]

I made a new logo!

[Dozer]

I really must say... This looks cool!

Just downloaded the demo... Only thing that I can crit on so far (don't have time to play right now) is your website... I did not realize that you could scroll down so I ended up sitting there for a minute. I did figure it out (I could just be dumb lol) but other people may not realize which could lead to a loss of interest. Just figured I would say that, much to my embarrassment, because I'm pretty sure that was just me being a dumbass lol. Also, I don't think that in the instructions it should say you need a keyboard and a mouse... Unless I am going to yell at the tanks to work (Would be hilarious... "RIGHT! NO RIGHT NOT FIGHT!") than that is pretty much a given (I'm not that much of a dumbass  )

Oh and btw, This looks cool! :D

[Vino]

Haha... sometimes I forget that not everybody has a ridiculously large screen like I do. Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.