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.
