Pico Tanks is a multiplayer mobile game of bite-sized battles between adorable little tanks. This is a game that can be enjoyed by casual players in short sessions, but also offers great depth and strategy for an enthusiastic and dedicated fanbase. Bite-sized team multiplayer. Few experiences in gaming are as satisfying as winning as a team, but it can be hard to find the time to dedicate to intense online multiplayer titles. Pico Tanks offers deep, strategic, team-based gameplay that can be enjoyed in quick 5-10 minute sessions. A huge amount of depth. While casual players can just jump in and have fun, there’s immense depth for enthusiastic players to explore. Custom-build a tank from dozens of different components, personalise it with decorative items, then deploy it across a diverse range of maps and game modes. The strategic and creative possibilities are endless! Built to encourage teamwork. Pico Tanks is played from a top-down view, so every player can easily see what’s going on and work out where they are needed. It also has built-in systems for team communication and positive feedback to facilitate and reward teamwork. Satisfying feedback. Just because it’s cute doesn’t mean players won’t get the full tank experience! Pico Tanks features visceral audio and visual feedback like weapon recoil, environmental interaction, camera shake, and high impact effects to let players really feel the action. Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel A player’s tank consists of a base, weapon and abilities. The base is what moves a player's tank around the battlefield, is also determines the tanks health points, speed, stability and the number of ability slots. Some examples of tank bases include: - Typical tank base - Hovercraft - Quad Copter The tank weapon is mounted on the top of the player's tank base and is the primary means of destroying the enemy. The player's weapon choice determines their effective combat range and how best to approach enemies. Weapons vary greatly in damage/healing dealt, projectile speed, projectile trajectory, effective range, fire rate, reload speed and kickback. Our goal is to have a weapon selection comparable to the Worms series of games by Team17. Some weapon examples include: - Standard cannon - Bounce cannon - Zapper Abilities are the extra tools the player can use to obliterate the enemy or support their team. Some examples of abilities include: - Personal bubble shield - Targeted airstrike - Deployable turret Post release we're are planning to add a survival mode where a solo player or team fights increasingly difficult waves of AI enemies, more content and a possible release on console and steam. Check back for updates
Swarming Missile Test Thanks dreadnok & thomas.foster Fun with new projectile types. Here is a swarming missile test =D Since Pico Tanks is multiplayer to sync the projectile across clients we send the projectiles initial position, velocity and launch time. When the message is received by another player we can fast forward the projectile to it's correct location. The noise function uses the projectiles network ID added to the projectiles lifetime to generate a random position, this way each projectiles movement is different but also deterministic.
Pico Tanks - Quad Copter Tank Base Test We're in the process of implementing and testing the 60 weapons and tank bases our artist has mocked up. For the quad copter tank base we've added the ability to tilt the tank in the direction its moving.
Pico Tanks - Zapper! Had way to much fun implementing the Zapper gun! YouTube In case anyone is curious the effect is made up of a line renderer with a particle system and glow quad at each end. If you have any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them
Yeah I thought people would be more excited Any thoughts on why people aren't showing their support? We've made it so the Zapper arcs across multiple bad guys We'll probably make the damage, effective range and targets the arc will traverse upgradeable.
I really don’t know, could it be the online multiplayer aspect? Is there a single player campaign that allows you to just play against the AI?
Yeah you're probably right We're are planning to add a survival mode where a solo player or team fights increasingly difficult waves of AI enemies. This mode will probably come post release. I will add this info to the top of the thread.
Game looks fantastic!! I saw the game is made in Unity. Did you guys use a networking library or write your own?
Wow thanks invulse! We're using Nakama by Heroic Labs. This is the first project we've used it on but so far it has been a positive experience We tried UNet and Photon(every flavor) all of which didn't work well at the prototyping stage, they were either horribly laggy or felt unresponsive to the player. We're constantly playing and testing on a mobile internet connection and it's working great so far
Thanks iJailBreaker Every Friday we spend a part of the day working on something fun. We put together some tools to help automate parts of our level authoring process. We already had a tool to create bezier curves, so today we put together some code to generate a forest inside of the polygon defined by the curve. We could place the trees by hand, but we have a visibility system in the game that hides players who enter a group of trees and we'd have to update that system every time we move the trees around. Now we just reshape the forest by modifying the bezier curve and the forests are updated along with the visibility manager. We have a fence generation tool that also works with a bezier curve. The fence segments and posts are instantiated along the curve at a set distance between each other, and the code that generates the fence 'wires up' every segment to its neighboring posts. This ensures that when the player destroys a post the segments connected to it break too. This would be pain to do by hand, so we've automated it too. # Here is a video of the bezier tool, tree and fence generator in action! Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel
This game looks awesome. I have attempted several of the io type tank games, but this looks way better. Looking foward to give it a go.