Tank Squad News

[h2]Dear Tankers,[/h2]

Welcome to our 6th Development Status. We want to share with you the results of the last two weeks of our work.

Transportation

Our AI programmer has been working on infantry behavior. He programmed the Infantry to be able to use tanks as a transport, just as in shown below Tank Desant. Crews of destroyed tanks will evacuate, and infantry under intense machine gun fire may decide to retreat.




Infantry Movement Animations

Our animator continues his work on a wide range of infantry animations. He keeps adding new positions of soldiers.

T-34/76 Tank Model

During those two weeks, our artist prepared for us a high poly tank model with suspension and tracks. You can see the results of his work in the image below.



Tank Desant

Tank desant is a military combined arms tactic, where infantry soldiers ride into an attack on tanks, then dismount to fight on foot in the final phase of the assault. Note that this differs from infantry troops merely riding on tanks as a form of ad-hoc transportation.

The tactic was used as an expedient by the Red Army during World War II. Tank desant troops (tankodesantniki) were infantry trained in the tactic in order to offer small-arms support in suppression of enemy anti-tank weapons or enemy infantry using anti-tank grenades. (Source: Wikipedia)



We are extending our team

New support programmer Patryk Kikowski and new Level Designer Denys Zosym have joined our team this week. Patryk at this moment is going to work on the implementation and configuration of VFX and on configuration of the Character Controller. Denys is going to work on a block out of a prototype level, which includes basic game mechanics that our programmers have prepared.

Thank you and have a good weekend!
DeGenerals

[h2]Dear Tankers,[/h2]

Welcome to our 5th Development Status. Here is progress we've made in the last two weeks.

Level Design

We’re testing a new level design tool, which automatizes the process of shaping the terrain. Our new program enables us to download the image from real-life satellites and transform it directly into the ingame landscape, including the curvature, rivers and other stuff. We hope that after using those tools, our levels will become more realistic.

We are not copying the map one to one, but it’s a good base and reference to begin work on a level.

Tank Multiplayer

Currently we are working on multiplayer stage in which couple of players will be able drive their tanks and interact with each other. We were able to connect 4 people in one session, each with own tank. We are going to focus on further improvement of this system.



Blood Particles

As we’ve shown in last Development Status, in explosions characters will split in parts. Our VFX artist is working on blood particles to behave naturally. After enemy’s death, his blood will be visible around his corpse and scattered around limbs.



Character Animations

Durning those two weeks, our animator was working on frequently occuring in-game animations, like walking, running, shooting, reloading. You can see his work on the gifs below.



Anti Tank Gun

Infantry is able to get into an anti-tank gun and use it. Artificial Intelligence can recognize our tank and attack it. That’s the basic behavior for anti-tank but we will develop it further.



Question
As always, we have a question for you. We are very interested in your feedback and suggestions. Do you have any ideas for missions or scenarios that you would like to see in Tank Squad?

Thank you and have a good weekend!
DeGenerals

[h2]Dear Tankers,[/h2]

Welcome to our 4th Development Status,
For the last 2 weeks, we were prototyping and testing Battle Level and Multiplayer Repair level for Tank Squad.

Multiplayer testing consisted in creating a scene with machine park and destroyed tank. We were able to connect 4 people and repair a tank in cooperation, where one player was a commander, and 3 of players were crewmen. From performing test we have noticed that repairing a tank can take from 20 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the complexity of the repairs. It is not going to be like in Tank Mechanic Simulator, where you need to disassemble whole tank.



Also, during creation of previously mentioned Battle Scene, we could test short, medium and long distance combat. Our map contains small village in which we placed random enemy spawners with different spawn rates. We want to make battles challenging and varied for our players.



In many games, once we destroy enemy tank, it explodes. In reality, sometimes when a tank was getting destroyed, or it’s crewmen were dead, you couldn’t tell from outside. We have tested both version of tanks, ones that explodes once destroyed and ones that do not explode. As you do not get feedback from destroying an enemy tank, while their crewman is dead, you have to take an extra effort and shoot 1 or 2 bullets more just in case.

We received a lot of questions about getting out of the tank durning a mission. Players will be able to do it, for example to repair the tank after it receives major damage, to pull it out of the mud, when it get stuck or to extinguish the tank when it starts burning.

We are modyfing the AI of enemy tanks. At our first attempt, they were definetely too smart and accurate. Our goal is to decrease their aiming skills to do not hit player’s tank every time, and to give our players a fair gameplay.
We have implemented the first trenches, in which enemy infantry is going to hide and keep attacking your vehicle with panzerfausts and explosives.

We have created a crane, which you will have to use to pick turret, engine and heavier parts of the tank. At least one player will have to operate it.



We’ve decided to make our characters get limbs detached in explosions. Let us know what do you think about it.



We are looking for references about the process of decision making, who, when and how decided about the damaged tank can or cannot be repaired? If you guys have references for this issue, books, videos etc. please share with us, thanks :)

Thank you for all your support. Happy Easter!


DeGenerals

[h2]Dear Tankers,[/h2]

Welcome to our 3rd Development Status,

[h3]Infantry AI[/h3]

We are very proud to inform that our team was enhanced by Marco, the maker of Easy Red 2 and will be working on helping us create a competent infantry AI.



The AI will try to follow our commands to move, attack, select target etc. Below we present the testing of move command execution, as well as formation movement commands. Bear in mind, everything is work in progress, the camera angle also is only to help the developer, the game won’t be an RTS type of game, nor it will have such cameras:

[h3]Visual metrics[/h3]

The optimalization process will be a hard one, as we will have to decide what is very important and needs to be synchronised between players, and what is only a visual effect, that is not essential to the server, and can be optionally shown to the player if required (so the server won’t blow up when it will be forced to synchronise hundreds of unimportant animations/particles).



What you see is a field of view from tank driver’s perspective. We measure how much detail can we have close to player’s view without overloading our performance limits and how many objects can we have far away. We are setting standards for optimization in the process of creating levels to make sure that the game won’t run smoothly only on latest PCs.

[h3]Programming[/h3]

We continue to search and find for the best programming practices.

Recently we adopt MVC (Model - Viewer - Controller) pattern for use with Unity Components.



So now we use it to split big and avoid big scripts by divide script in to 3 parts:

• Model - Data
  Viewer - Editor stuff
  Controller - Proper game logic

[h3]Characters and Animation[/h3]

Besides testing Inventory / Interaction system we also test Ragdoll on characters and detaching limbs from character (in explosion). We want to add variant that infantry close to explosion can lose their limbs.



[h3]Design[/h3]

We are organising a set of tests on following topics, feel free to ask us questions or answer ours, that we are asking below:

• Tank movement - bulky and realistic (thus slow and prone for malfunctions) or more arcade and dynamic?
  
• Enemy tanks behavior - AI spotting and decision making, range finding etc.
  
• Aim helper - should we allow for this at all?
  
• Giving feedback from hitting an enemy tank (how player will know that enemy tank is destroyed?)
  
• Gameplay balance between large open maps and small condensed ones
  
• Checkpoints on level - this is a coop game, should be this possible to save and load during battle?
  
• Tank camouflage - if player covers his tank with correct camo patternt/colors and add some bushes on top, how to make the enemy not see us?
  

Thanks and have a great weekend!

DeGenerals

[h2]Dear Tankers,[/h2]

Welcome to the second Development Status of Tank Squad. Here's what we have been working on lately...

[h3]Gameplay[/h3]

We continue testing our gameplay. We will be implementing multiplayer cooperation to our gameplay testing soon, so we will be able to repair a tank in cooperation. At the moment we will try only 4 players at once. The tank repair level includes interaction with crane, using tools and interaction with different NPC's as Quartermaster, Medic and Scout. Also one thing that we are testing is moving physical objects around the level.




When repairing, a tank commander will have a notebook with an actual tank status and a checklist of things to be repaired. His role will be to manage tank repairs and prepare a squad for battle. We don't know yet if tankers will have an access to all information that the commander will have. We want to make players cooperate in tank repairs instead of leaving each player on their own to do their thing.



We are preparing a test battle scene where we will be able to drive our tank and fight with enemy AI controlled tanks. We will be designing basic game strategy and missions by adding checkpoints, objectives etc. We are doing those tests and experiments to learn what gameplay we want to create in a first place.


*Most of the content in the scenes are placeholders for the sake of testing gameplay.

[h3]Infantry[/h3]

We've began to work on Infantry basic AI (Artificial Intelligence). During the battle, we will be supported by Infantry Squad and also we will be attacked by enemy anti-tank Infantry squad. Infantry will be able to move, attack and defend themselves. They will also be able to get into bunkers, buildings or trenches and throw different explosives at us.

Features:

• Infantry moves to checkpoints
  
• Intantry attacks and covers behind obstacles
  
• Infantry defends and holds the position
  
• Infranty gets into trenches and buildings
  

Features for Infantry we want to implement in the future:

• Infantry throws explosives at us
  
• Ally Infantry can climb on our tank
  
• Ally Infantry can use our tank as a cover
  
• Infantry can take an Anti-Tank gun
  

[h3]Research[/h3]

We are also dedicating time to do some historical research. How were tank crews repairing their tanks? What have they been doing when the tank was unrepairable? How have they been recovering them? We've got several dozens of World War II books. We want to make game realistic historically but at the same time entertaining. Our approach at the moment is to make historically correct scenes, tanks, infantry, equipment etc. but make gameplay to be fun and well balanced between relaxing entertainment and realism. We've gathered quite few historical books and we are slowly studying them.



*If you have any books, documentaries or resources that you think would be a good reference for us, feel free to share them in the comment.

[h3]Characters and Animation[/h3]



We continue our work with testing player character controller (we change previously used controller for new one). Right now we want to set up cooperation module for players and test interaction system. In the screen you can see look pose for characters, work in progress.

[h3]Visual Effects[/h3]


We are currently working on destructibles props. All destructions are made in Houdini. From the beginning we think about optimazation and we try to build procedural asset in Houdini wich
allows us customize quickly different setting and features like dimension of bricks, amount of bricks in rows and columns, size of object which emits force etc. This procedural tool/asset for brick wall is constantly honing and modifying to fits to our needs.



So far bricks can be replaced by bigger chunks with reduced amount of polygons, it will be especially useful for parts which are static not included in simulation.

[h3]Level Design[/h3]
We are in a process of hiring a new level designer. Someone who is going to design a whole campaign with levels, where he will implement game mechanics and design a fun gameplay. At the moment we aim at creating two campaigns, one for German side and other for Soviet side. Also we are doing a research on maps of Eastern Front villages and fields. From the research that we have done so far, we find out that it was a commom thing to set different (sometimes very creative traps) for tanks to temporarily immobilize them and make them more vulnerable to enemy fire.



Thanks and have a great weekend!

DeGenerals

* - Handbook on USSR Military Forces Robert L. Bolin, Depositor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

** - https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=74432db26a844a6b8428a454f88e01a0%20%20