Hello

In this post I try to explain what is actually Battle City is, and what should we calculate with if we want to recreate it.

Basic gameplay

The goal of the original game is to defend your flag with your tank, against the enemy tanks controlled by the computer. The tanks can shoot and with it they can destroy walls and other tanks as well. The enemy tanks are spawn in a random fashion on the edge of the map, so the player never knows where they will come from.

The map itself consists of destroyable and undestroyable walls, grass where tanks can hide and rivers where a tank cant goes trough. These map elements are placed on a grid, but the tanks are not restricted to this grid although they can only move vertically and horizontally so perpendicular move is not allowed. Since the walls have semi destroyed states, it can occurs that a skilled player destroys a wall and shoots through the crack. An important feature of the tank combat is the fact that two bullet can destroy each other.

Certain enemy tanks can give a player a power up after they die. This power up will spawn on a random part of the map and can upgrade the bullet speed, the tank speed and other stats of the player’s tank.

The game ends when all the enemy waves are finished or the player flags is captured. The flag capturing can be done by the enemy by penetrating the wall around the flag and shooting the flag.

The original game can be played as a couch coop. In this game mode bothers players are controlling separate tanks, they have one flag and there are more tanks as well.

Elements of the game

• Tank
  • Tanks can be controlled by either one of the players or the computer
  • There are different type of enemy tanks. For example there is the speed tank or the armored tank
• Wall
  • Destroyable - Brick walls
    • Destroyable walls can be destroyed (🤯)
    • They have multiple destroy states where they cover different parts of the map
  • Undestroyable - Steal walls
    • Undestroyable walls wont effected by bullets
• Grass
  • Tanks can move trough grass and in the meantime they can’t be seen by the enemy
• River
  • Tanks can’t move trough them, but they can shoot trough them
• The flag
  • The is always one flag in a map and it’s been surrendered by walls
• Power ups
  • Spawns after certain enemy kills
  • Add some boost to the player stats

Our interpretation

First of all we decided to change the tanks to mechs because they are much more cooler. If someone wants to play with tanks then there is a whole World of Tanks what can be played with.

The other thing what might be fun is to include new map elements like gas stations what can be blown up, or holes where you can shoot trough but can’t move trough unless you fall down and destroyed your own mech.

Besides the map it would be nice to include new types of playable characters and weapons. These can for example smaller mechs or weapons which can destroy walls more effectively but weak against mechs. In the original game the computer most of the time just went for the flag but with various characters they could have other priorities like hunt down the player.

Although we don’t want to change the core game loop but it would be a nice experience to try it out with multiple flags. Or to give the player some secondary goals. The coop is also a thing where we can experiment but to make it a 1v1 game is kinda out of scope since it would become a low budget MOBA what is not our favorite bread.

I think that’s it for now. Tomorrow I may start to put together a feature/requirement list for the game to move forward with the design document.

Have a nice time and bye

~ Qnbie