Game Design and Principles

On this page, you can find information that covers the aspects of game design that went into development of HoverTanks.

Gameplay Considerations
After initial discussions of the game's concept, it became evident that we needed to be careful of designing a game that would be fair to its players.

When someone first plays, it is possible that their first instinct may be to apply as many components to their vehicle as possible, in order to have the best vehicle. However, such a strategy does not account for problems with mobility, or quality of build and design. Such problems with their vehicle may be due to the weight of components slowing them down, or exposed caches of ammo becoming the targets of opponents, in order to achieve a quick victory.

The penalty of bringing more powerful components into a game is that they are often considerably heavier than weaker counterparts, and this impacts the responsiveness of a vehicle by slowing its acceleration. The lack of acceleration can be remedied with the addition of more engines, but this increases the fuel consumption and so a larger volume of fuel needs to be included. Fuel is volatile and a target for enemies, and without enough of it a vehicle cannot fly.

On the other hand, users with light and nimble vehicles trade off their endurability and weapon power for the opportunity to run rings around their opponents, becoming difficult to hit and enabling them to surgically strike their enemies' vulnerable parts.

Movement System The game's unique movement system is entirely physics based. It uses an emulated fly-by-wire scheme to turn the user's input into thrust vectors for each engine on a vehicle to try and acheive.

The system keeps the user's vehicle stable and level while no input is received, and otherwise moves the craft in the direction/rotation indicated by the player. The control scheme mimmicks that of a traditional 1st person shooter, where WASD controls fowards/left/back/right translation and the mouse movement controls pitch and yaw rotation. Rolling can be used to acheive a faster strafe left or right.

It should adapt to any layout so a badly design vehicle will fly less efficiently than one with an optimum layout, but only something that is completely unbalanced or unable to lift itself should not be able to fly.

Weapons
Weapons (initially) will be limited to ballistic weapons such as cannons and machine guns.

Being controlled by the physics engine, projectiles will follow a (mostly) parabolic trajectory, and deal damage according to the energy of their impact. They will be subject to air resistance and gravity. An intermediate goal is that we have the projectiles penetrating objects, dealing subsequent damage to objects on the other side with however much energy remains. This introduces far more depth to armour and component placement, where not only surface area matters, but angle of attack and impact velocity as well.

Damage
The components on a vehicle provide all of its functionality. Damage will be dealt to specific components of a vehicle, affecting their function. When a component receives too much damage it will be considered destroyed and stop functioning entirely. For example, a damaged engine may run slower and hotter. A destroyed engine would not run at all. A damaged targeting computer may output innaccurate or unintelligible information, while a destroyed computer outputs nothing.

A player 'dies' when their tank has had its functioning reduced to the point where it is unable to move under its own power or shoot any of its weapons.

Single components may have multiple subsystems that can be damaged independantly of each other. A method (other than arbitrary choice) of which subsystems are damaged when the component take damage is yet to be determined.

Difficulty of Gameplay
Difficulty options that affect the simulation depth will not be present. It is up to the user to how difficult they wish to make a scenario by varying the numbers and designs of enemies and friendlies. If the challenge of a particular match setup is too much then it is up to the player to either improve their skills, or refine their vehicle, so that they may be more competitive.

Style Guide
The art style is to have a realistic appearance, with fairly detailed textures and correctly proportioned objects. Vehicle components will have a “terrestrial” and militaristic look, akin to what the components of modern military technology looks like.

Specifics
Models, shapes etc.

Components will be quite angular and geometric, somewhat resembling modern military tech.

Textures
Textures will have a functional, militaristic appearance. They may use camouflage. The textures will also look somewhat “worn”, as if the component has seen use before (this is particularly true of cheaper, inferior components).

Sound effects
All sounds should be realistic, or a close aproximation to realism. Sound effects include vehicle movement and thrust, explosions, collisions and other weapons firing.

Menus


Menus should follow the standard Windows layouts that many people are already accustomed to, with file actions at the top-left, application actions at the top-middle and access to help or other information at the top-right. The art style of the menus should correspond to the rest of the game