Hello again!

Walls, grids, maps and projectiles. In a game like what we want to build here, these are really important building blocks. As I explained the original Battle City game in the previous post, the playing ground of this game is consists of a grid and on the grid there are multiple terrain elements. One of them is the destroyable wall which will be our main focus in this post with its multiple destroy state and interesting strategic implications.

Destroying walls brick-by-brick

In the original game one wall object is consist of 8x8 smaller piece. It’s due to the hardware constraints, mainly the fact that all sprite was stored as 4 smaller picture. The nice thing what came from this is that the play could destroy half of a wall if its aiming is precise enough or creating paths by destroying half of the wall one wall and half of another.

The other aspect of this half destroyed wall feature is the projectile it self. It should have a small enough hit box to be able to collide with one half of the wall but big enough to be able to hit two half walls as well.

I think in our game it will be implemented in a way where one wall piece is consisted 4 separate entity with 4 separate hit box. The bullet it self will have a smaller hit box then one wall part to be able to precisely destroy part of the map. On those occasions where one bullet is hitting two wall part in the same time there will be a distance check to see which wall part is the nearest one and it will be destroyed since that is most likely the one what the player is aiming for. This communication could be tricky but if its done on the “bullet side” of things, it could work with infinite number of walls at the same time, although I don’t think more then three hit in the same time is possible.

The playground

There was a discussion between Bread and me about how to create maps. My first idea was to go for procedural generation (I’m kinda obsessed with this topic), but for simplicity and because of the enjoyment factor, we decided to go with hand crafted ones. Luckily the only real constraint for these maps is to surround the flag with walls and to leave out spaces on the side where enemy tanks can spawn.

On most of the original maps, the flag is on the side, but from a gameplay perspective, there is no reason for that. It’s true that something on the side is easier to defend since you only have to defend it from 3 side, instead of 4 when it placed on the middle of the board. Right now it’s another interesting topic where we could do some experiment.

Back on the topic of hand crafted maps, there is two interesting challenge what we could take on. One is to create some kind of map design tool where anybody can create maps like in a Mario Maker game. The other challenge is to develop some kind of map format where we could save, load and perhaps share maps. Obviously none of these problem are crucial to finish the game, but they are really natural development points, and by factoring them in at an early version, we could avoid decisions what completely prevents the future implementation of these features.

I hope this post was entertaining enough. Personally I like to go somewhat deeper in these topics since it will be a crucial part in the final design document as well where all the detail and planed feature will be presented. Until then, I will try to write down all of my thoughts on these topics :D

Until next time! ~ Qnbie