Development Update
With the final Season One feature released last week, Season Two development is now in full swing and the team has made great initial progress.
During Season One, we brought in a number of developers to help us during critical periods of development. While this helped get us across the line, the codebase started to become difficult to extend and build upon. Latent defects were not being addressed and new features were taking too long to deploy — a result, in part, due to the fractured nature of the evolving code base.
Just before Easter, we took the executive decision to retire the old code base (both the on-chain and Unity game code) and start from fresh taking the learnings and key assets from Season One in to the new code base. While starting again was risky, the progress we’ve made has justified this approach.
In just under two weeks we’ve achieved the milestone of having a playable and nearly feature-complete end-to-end game running online (off chain, hosted by a server) hosting multiple parties (albeit in the same household). While there is still a significant amount of work to do to get everything production ready, we are confident that the new foundation will allow us to remain agile and focus on delivery efficiency into the future.
Season Two will come with new features and game play options, extending what we learned in Season One while giving us the opportunity to integrate NFTs with special characteristics.
Obstacles and Barriers
In Season One, we became familiar with barrier tiles in the Cauldron map — some tiles could not be moved on to, while allowing the tank to shoot over/through the barrier. In Season Two we are extending this to have tiles which cannot be shot through (at certain angles).
Here is an example of how the line of sight for a tank with barriers and obstacles looks like with trees in the way.
The selected tank has a range of four tiles however the trees are a shooting barrier, so that only certain tiles on the other side are accessible (between the trees).
In the future, we envision tank characteristics which make shooting through trees require an ability such as marksmanship which will change the odds of a successful shot through a barrier.
If we move the tank into the gap between the trees, we see that the line of sight changes dramatically.
Shootable trees?
What if you could shoot the trees to destroy them to forge a path through the forest or to increase your line of sight at the expense of consuming energy?
Here is a conceptual mock-up of how this might look.
The tree tiles has three “hearts”, with each shot felling a tree. The destruction of a tree might even drop a loot-boxes!
These new mechanisms are a glimpse into the new layers of strategy and complexity we are planning on introducing to the game play throughout Season Two and beyond!
Map Editor
To facilitate the rapid development of new content for Season Two, we’re building a map editor tool. While the first few versions of this tool will be for internal consumption only, we’re aiming to develop this to eventually become part of the core game offering. We want to build this tool such that map creators can be rewarded by creating maps which are used in gameplay!
We hope you’ve enjoyed a taste of what is to come for Season Two of Tanks For Playing!
