Armoured And Dangerous Beta Testing

Hi all,

After a loooooot of polishing and arguing and testing and iterating and reiterating we have finally managed to get the game up for beta testing. The testing is currently in progress at overcloud9 website. Here is the link Beta Testing Forum

It was long hard couple of weeks with almost all aesthetic parts of the game going through some major polishing work. A lot of credit must go to overcloud9 herself for providing a new set of eyes and taking personal interest in the project. We have introduced a new campaign mode which unlocks the features of the game. This has added a new depth to it. We have also added initial sounds and music provided by sumith sureesh. Nothing much added in technology or game play. So I ll just post some screenshots and leave it at that.

Huge Update on Armoured and Dangerous

Hi all,

It has now been about a month since i have put anything up. Sorry about the long gap. It has truely been  a very hectic and eventful month, looking back. Anyway, today as i look at the things that i could write about i feel like i am spoiled for choice.

First to give you an update on the progress and current state of the game. We have completed working almost all the major sections of the game. Both in the programming and the art the game is fully functional and ready for alpha testing. What the game lacks at this stage is the polish both on the programming front and the art side. I am putting up a few screen shots so you can take a look at the graphics and the functionality.
We have decided to release this game for both XBL as well as PC downloadable platforms. For the PC we are yet to solve the DRM issue but right now the idea is to go the no-DRM way and launch it fully based on honor system.
We have had to make a few changes in the design since the last time i blogged. The game now has three game-play modes:

1) Capture the flag : A race to collect the maximum possible supplies before it is all gone, while battling your enemies. In this mode tanks re-spawn after being killed.

 2) Death Match : This mode is for quick play. Kill all your enemies tanks before they destroy yours. The tanks once destroyed do not re-spawn in this mode.

3) Search And Destroy :  This mode is the main strategy and warfare mode. Search for your enemy's command center and destroy it before your command center is destroyed.

We have worked on a lot of things during the last month. The most noteworthy of them i  think is the AI. Being a strategy game "Armoured and Dangerous" requires a good AI system over anything else. The main challenges for the AI were,
-> Tanks would have to behave like they could not see the enemies covered by the fog, while maintaining the game difficulty. Here what could happen is either the AI is behaving too random or too structure. We needed to achieve a balance so that the it is both believable and challenging.
-> The planning needed to be done at the team level (collection of tanks) and the execution has to be perform at tank level.
-> Different game play modes mean different rules and different objectives.
-> needs to be scalable for difficulty.

To solve all of these problems but still keep the frame rate high on a med spec PC. A unique approach was taken "Weighted Probabilistic Branching FSM". This essentially means assigning weights to all the possible moves based on the current context. So if right now it is more important to fire Tank1's primary at the particular place then that tank and that action would get the maximum weights and things that did not matter or were not good for the overall plan then those conditions are not entered in the pool.


The game will be out for beta soon. Hope  we get a lot of you to come and play it and give us your feedback. I hope to be blogging a little more regularly from here on. Here come the screen shots.

Menus

Hi all,

Another Week has gone by and this one was faster than usual (or is it just me?). Here's the update for this week.

A big problem for me while making any game is the Menu system. One of the biggest aims of the technology that we develop is to have zero scripting required to make a game. Menus are different for each game. Hence it needs to be customizable and that generally means at least a little scripting involved. Our Menu system until last week was very difficult to script in order to do what is required. Also there were some design issues in the classes. So i started this week determined to make the menu system absolutely sleek in code while maintaining the generic nature required to do any game. So at the end of the week i have managed to achieve this goal by using several generic variables and lists that would store the game initialization information. However on the down side the menu is now even more difficult for an artist to script. Solution: Tool. For the next game, when it is time to start working on the menus, i plan on making a tool that can be used to load up all the different resources, drag and drop them on the screen and assign behaviors from there and save the scripts.

Currently we have a fairly decent menu system capable of handle most requirements. Some of its features are:-

3D viewports - capable of loading and displaying several game objects like players, characters and levels.
Graphics - images that user cannot interact with, these also have several behaviors that can be attached like cycling a directory of images etc.

Buttons - User interact able images that can do quite a lot like take you to a different menu, open a new messagebox, start a game etc. They can have keys associated with them. They have 2D particles that can be enabled. They also have several actions on events such as rollovers.
Sliders - used for setting any real variables in the game such as volume or brightness or gamma.

Each page can have sounds and button change can also have a different sound.

Most of these behaviors were already coded for during development of "Drag Impact" some of the features are brand new. Anyway completed "Tank Battle" Menu. Posting some screen shots below. Please do let us know what you think. Some of the images need minor changes which get done this week.

The others in the meanwhile have been trying to populate the levels more and polish it up with billboards and trees and water. However it has been sort of a slow week with the festival taking a few good working days and a very badly times UPS failure. I hope to have a lot of eye candy next week with good looking particles and levels. So if you are reading this you dont want to miss that :)

On a side note Mid Day Bangalore edition did a story on us. Here is the link Mid Day story

Hello World!!!! First Post

Hello Everyone,

This is the first blog of mine ever and the first blog of Phantasm Games. Hence the big "Hello World". Always meant to have a blog that showcased any progress we made at the studio and get feedback from everyone, just never really did much about it. I hope to blog regularly from here on in.

To introduce us briefly, Phantasm Games is a small independent game development studio based in Bangalore, India. We are currently a team of about 5 artists and 1 programmer (me). We develop casual, arcade style video games mainly for the XBL platform.

We have released a game on XBLIG titled "Drag Impact". You can download to your xbox 360 from here
Drag Impact : Marketplace

Currently working on our second XBLIG title "Tank Battle" (Working Title).  Here are some in-game work-in-progress screen shots.

Mainly i think we would like the blog to remain on technical aspect of the games that are being developed from time to time. We will be posting a lot of screen shots (probably every week even). I hope we get a lot of feedback to help us improve the games we are making. So please keep checking in and don't forget to add comments.

Thanks to everyone who visits the blog from,

Phantasm Games