Announcing the Tank game project

A colleague, Mark, was interested to make a tank game so much that he drafted a Game Design Document with information more than enough to start creating a prototype.

The very core concept is a Defense of the Ancients meets Battle City. In case you’re not aware of Battle City, it is a top-view 2D game about tanks defending a base from enemy’s (AI’s) tanks. Battle City was a console game from the 80s — a real retro game you can say. Lucky for you, you can try and play Battle City right in your browser with the help of a Java NES emulator called vNes.

Initial technical specification is to implement it in Python as a practice to learning the Python language. Sadly, we only have enough free time to write the game itself. So I suggested, why not use KonsolScript. With me doing the programming stuff and him doing the sprites, the game should be completed real soon, right? Wrong.

Mark was limited to using Microsoft Powerpoint for quick sketch, and GIMP for painstakingly creating the sprites, pixel by pixel.

As for the programming part, writing the prototype revealed just how slow Quixie is with KonsolScript engine. Like Toto’s fan game “Metal Slug Kuno“, this tank game is also using arrays of UDT in encapsulating the tank as an object. I was there when Toto was writing Metal Slug Kuno. I was so amazed as to how easy for a beginner to write his first game using KonsolScript. So amazed that I overlooked one very important thing — the frame rate. Toto’s game was averaging 25fps on Windows and 10fps on emulated (via VirtualBox) GNU/Linux — a very low frame rate which was clearly suggesting that the KonsolScript engine is not production ready in terms of speed. Something I didn’t bother fixing for quite a long time (Toto wrote it around September 2008) until now — I have been busy at night working on Quixie‘s scripting engine.

While Mark’s game is progressing, Quixie (as a KonsolScript engine) is maturing more and more. Mark agreed to open source the game — you can watch the game improve overtime in this blog and you can also get to try it for yourself by accessing it on its download page.

~creek23