Steeting towards more active gameplay

Until now our pickups used to be completely passive. They just gave you an increase in a stat such as fire rate, which wasn't very engaging, and some you even wanted to avoid picking up all together. So we are making a switch to pickups you can choose when to activate yourself. Right now we only have 2: Leaving behind a strip of mud to slow down your enemies, or dashing forward and high speed causing damage to enemies you hit. It's just a start, and we have some interesting ideas coming up to change up the gameplay. They are also random to add some suprise!

Code

As mentioned, passive powerups are gone, but not completely, we instead turned them into a system for buffs and debuffs, allowing us to easily implement mechanics like our new mud that slows tanks down. As a replacement we've added a new system where players can choose when to use them, and that can cause more interesting events. To allow this to happen, players can pick up and hold 1 pickup at a time. And thanks to a solid base, we can do some whacky stuff with it.

We've also changed up the shooting mechanics. Until now you always spawned a hazard when your bullet dies, making you wonder why you don't just spam the shoot button. To change this we've added a charge system to shooting bullets. Charge goes up over time and resets whenever you fire a bullet. if your charge is below 25% you shoot simple bullets that don't leave a hazard. From 25% to 100% change your bullets do leave a hazard, but they increase in size the higher your charge! In addition, as azards are more rare and to make them more rewarding, hazards will deal more damage, and slow down tanks caught inside it.

Another addition is get settings. While still WIP, we've been working on a way for the play to change up the game rules. Want more health, more wins to a victory, faster rate of fire? Sure!

The last change was the addition of 'scrolling text'. We can now show temporary text on the screen that moves around. This allowes us to show the names of pickups when a player picks something up, which is pretty useful when it's random which pickup you get.

Art

The artists have started working on some new interface art so we can get rid of our programmer art. First up, some HUD improvements. It's still a mockup, but it's looking neat already!

We have also started decorating the level so it no longer looks like a bunch of white bars. It's WIP and gameplay is still missing, but it gives you an idea of where we're heading towards. The two water pools in the middle will be replaced with mud pools.

Terrain & grass

We now use terrain so we have more control over the painting of the sand textures. This also gives the ability to add foliage / grass easily.

Props

We also created an old english phone booth and fence props.

Build controls

With the new pickups, we have new controls as well. The controls for player 2 have also moved to the numpad! So be sure to check the in 'How to play' section on the main menu.