User comments

Andrucha Channel
13.01.2018 — 10:57

You won't believe it, but I'm 14)))

All about tanks
14.01.2018 — 18:50

Valerdos Dray
17.01.2018 — 17:31

Open two MTOs

Minecraft Clash Royale
19.01.2018 — 18:50

Q1+Q2=winter war

Games Channel
21.01.2018 — 11:14

connect BT 2 and BT 5

CAT MARKUS COTOFEY IN THE VILLAGE
24.01.2018 — 09:14

Games Channel
23.01.2018 — 12:42

connect BT 2 and BT 5

Boris Lyakhov
26.01.2018 — 04:42

BT5 + BT 7 = Wine for Maskva

Nadka Kisya channel Ala Gubchak
27.01.2018 — 08:27

Vasya Sukhumsky
28.01.2018 — 16:10

In figurative

Andrucha Channel
30.01.2018 — 10:53

Max Bilinovich
31.01.2018 — 23:15

marseille stream
03.02.2018 — 00:19

tell me how to get through the USSR

alvamar.ru

Tank masters USSR recipes - All recipes

User comments

Andrucha Channel
28.09.2018 — 07:11

You won't believe it, but I'm 14)))

All about tanks
29.09.2018 — 20:03

How old are you please tell me 8.5

Valerdos Dray
01.10.2018 — 16:33

Open two MTOs

Minecraft Clash Royale
04.10.2018 — 15:42

Q1+Q2=winter war

Games Channel
05.10.2018 — 16:07

connect BT 2 and BT 5

CAT MARKUS COTOFEY IN THE VILLAGE
07.10.2018 — 10:44

Games Channel there will be a map thanks Aya debt thought

Games Channel
07.10.2018 — 21:32

connect BT 2 and BT 5

Boris Lyakhov
10.10.2018 — 20:27

BT5 + BT 7 = Wine for Maskva

Nadka Kisya channel Ala Gubchak
13.10.2018 — 10:55

Boris Lyakhov learn to write and then write

Vasya Sukhumsky
12.10.2018 — 01:38

In figurative

Andrucha Channel
13.10.2018 — 23:00

Ludmila Bilinovich
15.10.2018 — 12:33

and I’m already in Germany, and I graduated from the USSR

marseille stream
18.10.2018 — 06:14

tell me how to get through the USSR

alena-suveniry.ru

Tank Masters - alchemy with tanks

Today, tanks have become a truly important part of the gaming industry. With their help, you can become participants in great battles that have already won the hearts of millions of people around the world. It is also worth saying that recently mobile devices More and more original developments of this type are coming out, which are definitely worthy of attention.

IN in this case we'll talk not about a game like Timelines: Assault on America, where you need to take part in harsh battles, but about completely different game worlds.

Features of the game process

A game Tank Masters Quite recently came out, but has already managed to gain a considerable number of fans. In this development we are offered some details of modern and classic tanks. With their help, it becomes possible to collect absolutely incredible equipment, the capabilities of which depend only on our tactics in the game. The game has excellent graphics and a huge amount features that are not found in any alchemy game.

Game process video

Download from Google Play | Download from the site

samsung-galaxy.mobi

• 
• 
  
  

The story is about how the creators of Berserk Online decided to switch to tanks and what came of it.

As you know, any self-respecting gaming company should make a game about tanks. We, Bytex, were no exception.

The game Tank Masters is a variation on the theme of the old classic game for DOS "Alchemy", but uses the setting of the history of the development of tank building. The game is very simple, the rules are elementary, so the main importance in the game is the list of elements and “recipes”, thoughtful gameplay, as well as graphics and sound.

Idea

The general idea was formed very quickly, but the details were changed several times during the pre-production stage. Initially, one large branch was planned, in which all the large tank nations were mixed. This idea was quickly abandoned, realizing the need to display a huge number of elements in the interface, and they settled on another option: one nation = one campaign in the game. As a result, having “shoveled” through many interface sketches, we received an assessment in terms of interface convenience - a maximum of 12 groups of 10 elements each.

Main game screen options:

Then came the selection of elements that were destined to be included in the game.

Since Bytex is a Russian gaming company, it was decided to start with the USSR tank building school as the closest and most familiar. Selecting the main groups, including tanks, was not difficult. This immediately included cars familiar to many from online game World of Tanks. Starting with the legendary “thirty-fours” and ISs and ending with the A-20, A-44 and KV-13 prototypes that did not go into production. Next, no less obvious “spare parts” for the tanks were added: various elements of the chassis, engine compartment, guns, etc.

To increase historical diversity, famous designers and famous events were added, one way or another connected with tank building:

Start

The most difficult and interesting, of course, was the process of composing reactions. Some of the already planned elements had to be removed, replaced with others to build more logical connections. There were also some seemingly strange, but quite logical reactions.

When creating the list of reactions, we also did not forget about the addictiveness of the gameplay, the involvement of the player and the motivation to use the tips. The number of available reactions at the beginning of the game is constantly growing, so the player only needs to collect the first 10-15 elements to get carried away with the process. This continues until the creation of the first tank, which, according to the canons of World of Tanks, is the MS-1. The number of possible reactions is then gradually reduced to increase again after the discovery of a new key element and reward the player with the opportunity to quickly progress in the game for his efforts. When there are few unknown elements left, finding acceptable combinations becomes very difficult.

The list of elements was originally compiled on a piece of paper in a box, which was very inconvenient to change and check. Therefore, almost immediately a tool for visual editing of sets and reactions was implemented.

Since for a simple task we took such a large combine as Grails, it is easy to guess that the capabilities of the framework were largely used. For the convenience of the game designer, you can edit elements using AJAX:

We began to deal with future errors in the backend using validation mechanisms. Also, to avoid problems in the future, filters were written that help find possible errors (broken pictures, forgotten descriptions); or a filter that displays items that do not belong to any groups.

It was useful to write scripts to search for elements that, in principle, cannot be obtained. The presence of such elements is a very big mistake. Initial elements (which also cannot be obtained from others) have been marked with the "basic" flag.

Mobile app

The application is implemented in C# using Unity3D. Despite the 3D suffix, Unity is also quite suitable for developing 2D games. The most important thing: if some functionality is missing in the Unity framework itself, you can find a plugin in the Unity Asset Store. Many of the plugins are free.

Choosing a game architecture is one of the most important decisions made before development begins. We studied many games with similar themes and decided that the option of creating different screens in different scenes was not suitable for us. This would not allow for the required smoothness of switching between screens and would make it very difficult to add transitions when they change.

We implemented something similar to scenes, but with our own means. We have a screen manager, which has its own state machine that can switch between screens. Each screen implements an interface with the Hide and Show methods and has several events of the type: OnShow, OnHide. This gave us the ability to use Mecanim to create screen transition animations and made them easier to work with.

At the beginning of development, we were faced with a difficult choice: use well-known libraries that simplify 2D development (for example, ngui), or take a risk and try to implement everything using the newly appeared Unity UI system. We chose the latter and almost didn’t regret it, although in the end the game turned out to be a mixture of sprite (used in the gameplay itself) and canvas (used in the menu, header, tooltips).

The application is extremely simple. There are 7 game screens in total, which correspond to 7 controllers - MonoBehaviour. On the one hand, they subscribe to events from invisible objects, for example, to game store events. On the other hand, if necessary, they create pop-up windows and dialogs, control sounds and music.

A little about the libraries used. We selected plugins based on the following characteristics:

● the plugin is developing, there is a community - Unity does not stand still, you don’t want to face the problem of incompatibility of the old version of the plugin with the new Unity and the lack of desire of developers to upgrade the plugin;

● the plugin is free, or there is a “free” (shareware) version for testing - buying a plugin only to understand that it is not suitable did not suit us;

● open source - not a prerequisite, but highly desirable. Sometimes you urgently need to fix some found bug, and spending a week waiting for changes from developers is not always possible.

To store data, we use JSON, which is easy to view with your eyes and easy to export from the reaction editor. To work with JSON inside Unity, our choice fell on JSONObject - it has everything you need and has a fairly high operating speed; it automatically processes a list with a history of reactions, consisting of 2-3 thousand elements, in less than one second.

Android Immersive Mode- this is a very small but very important plugin that increases the player’s immersion in the game; Accordingly, the time spent in the game increases. This is a required plugin for Android, so I had to dig a little into the sources and add “#if UNITY_ANDROID”: without them, the plugin prevented me from building the project for iOS. Immersive mode is a mode in which your program is shown to the user in full screen, while no system panels are visible, including the navigation bar.

Facebook can be used as a universal solution. Linking a player to a Facebook account allows you to publish achievements via the Graph API. Besides, social media can be used to communicate with the player. In the case when a player has several devices (for example, a Windows laptop, an Android tablet and an iOS phone), it is most convenient to log in through social networks. The FB team has made life much easier for developers by releasing a plugin for Unity. Authorization/sharing - everything works out of the box.

DOTween– all animations inside the application are made using standard Unity, Mecanim and occasionally legacy animations, but the movement of elements in a spiral during reactions turned out to be easier to do with third-party plugins; for this, before the movement begins, several points are created along which DOTween builds a path for the object to move.

Soomla- “showcase”, which allows you to connect the program to several “markets” at once: Google Play Market, iTunes App Store,Amazon Appstore, Windows Phone Store. In our opinion, this is the only plugin that combines support for so many stores, has a good community, is rapidly developing, and is also free.

The library was used to translate the application SmartLocalization. There are sources on Github, a lot of positive reviews in the asset store. There is export/import to csv, it works almost without any comments. Initially, element translation was done in the element editor, but then it was a quick fix export was written in XML that is understandable for SmartLocaliztion.

Response.addHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8") def xml = new MarkupBuilder(response.writer) xml.root() ( for (def o: objects) ( data([" name": o.key, "xml:space": "preserve"]) ( value(o.value) ) ) response.writer.flush()
Next, the translations were imported into the Unity environment and edited on site. Thanks to this, it was possible to see if the translated text was out of bounds somewhere, and how everything would look in the end.

Art style

After the list of game elements became known, two of our artists began working on the graphic design.

The first step was to draw several sketches of game windows to decide on appearance games. As a result, the main colors in the design of the game were light gray tones and khaki, so that small text was easy to read, illustrations on a light background were clearly visible, and shades of green evoked associations in the player with a tank theme.

Having chosen a suitable visual style, we began to draw the remaining interface windows and at the same time work on illustrations of objects. It was decided to depict tanks and other objects in a comic book style to match the simple mechanics and general mood of the game. For tonal transitions, strokes were used instead of gradients (we borrowed this technique from illustrations of old technical literature). To small parts tanks were visible on the phone screen, in the illustrations we enlarged them a little, the chosen style did not contradict this.

Once ready, the graphical content was transferred to the programmers and miraculously appeared in the game. Day after day, the number of elements in the game grew. Subsequently, each tank acquired a camouflage pattern, which diversified the game graphics.

All animation in the game was made in Unity, which suited both programmers and artists. Artists liked the convenience of working with a timeline window similar to that of Adobe AfterEffects or Photoshop CS6, and programmers liked the lack of need to look for ways to import animation into Unity.

Voice acting

At the beginning of development, we took the voice acting and music from our other project. Final version we ordered it from a freelancer. When he provided the first voiceover options, it turned out that the sounds differed in duration. Worst of all, their duration was different from the sounds we used and, therefore, did not suit the animation. At this stage, we gave the freelancer an application with the provided set of sounds. Subsequently, all sounds were normalized for duration and volume, and several new voice-over ideas were proposed.

Readiness No. 1 and release

As a result, by combining all these parts, we got our game. Next, the assembled application was sent for testing to go through fire and water. Testing was carried out on more than 30 different devices. As a result, we had to compress some pictures, since only the artist could notice the difference by eye anyway - this saved us about 40MB of RAM. Then we combined element pictures with sprite sheets, which reduced the number of draw calls from ~430 to ~80. Added removal of objects located outside the scene, although they were not visible, each of them added additional draw calls. The game currently runs well on the iPhone 4, and runs on Android with 512MB of RAM.

Now that the vigilant and meticulous testers are happy with everything, all that remains is to upload the application to various trading platforms and wait for the exciting moment of launch.

Try to immerse yourself in the wonderful era of the first half of the twentieth century, when tanks turned from huge monsters into real war heroes.

Mobile application development

The story is about how the creators of Berserk Online decided to switch to tanks and what came of it.

As you know, any self-respecting gaming company should make a game about tanks. We, Bytex, were no exception.

Tank Masters is a variation on the old classic DOS game Alchemy, but uses the setting of the history of the development of tank building. The game is very simple, the rules are elementary, so the main importance in the game is the list of elements and “recipes”, thoughtful gameplay, as well as graphics and sound.

Idea

The general idea was formed very quickly, but the details were changed several times during the pre-production stage. Initially, one large branch was planned, in which all the large tank nations were mixed. This idea was quickly abandoned, realizing the need to display a huge number of elements in the interface, and they settled on another option: one nation = one campaign in the game. As a result, having “shoveled” through many interface sketches, we received an assessment in terms of interface convenience - a maximum of 12 groups of 10 elements each.

Main game screen options:

Then came the selection of elements that were destined to be included in the game.

Since Bytex is a Russian gaming company, it was decided to start with the USSR tank building school as the closest and most familiar. Selecting the main groups, including tanks, was not difficult. This immediately included cars familiar to many from online game World of Tanks. Starting with the legendary “thirty-fours” and ISs and ending with the A-20, A-44 and KV-13 prototypes that did not go into production. Next, no less obvious “spare parts” for the tanks were added: various elements of the chassis, engine compartment, guns, etc.

To increase historical diversity, famous designers and famous events were added, one way or another connected with tank building:

Start

The most difficult and interesting, of course, was the process of composing reactions. Some of the already planned elements had to be removed, replaced with others to build more logical connections. There were also some seemingly strange, but quite logical reactions.

When creating the list of reactions, we also did not forget about the addictiveness of the gameplay, the involvement of the player and the motivation to use the tips. The number of available reactions at the beginning of the game is constantly growing, so the player only needs to collect the first 10-15 elements to get carried away with the process. This continues until the creation of the first tank, which, according to the canons of World of Tanks, is the MS-1. The number of possible reactions is then gradually reduced to increase again after the discovery of a new key element and reward the player with the opportunity to quickly progress in the game for his efforts. When there are few unknown elements left, finding acceptable combinations becomes very difficult.

The list of elements was originally compiled on a piece of paper in a box, which was very inconvenient to change and check. Therefore, almost immediately a tool for visual editing of sets and reactions was implemented.

Since for a simple task we took such a large combine as Grails, it is easy to guess that the capabilities of the framework were largely used. For the convenience of the game designer, you can edit elements using AJAX:

We began to deal with future errors in the backend using validation mechanisms. Also, to avoid problems in the future, filters were written that help find possible errors (broken pictures, forgotten descriptions); or a filter that displays items that do not belong to any groups.

It was useful to write scripts to search for elements that, in principle, cannot be obtained. The presence of such elements is a very big mistake. Initial elements (which also cannot be obtained from others) have been marked with the "basic" flag.

Mobile app

The application is implemented in C# using Unity3D. Despite the 3D suffix, Unity is also quite suitable for developing 2D games. The most important thing: if some functionality is missing in the Unity framework itself, you can find a plugin in the Unity Asset Store. Many of the plugins are free.

Choosing a game architecture is one of the most important decisions made before development begins. We studied many games with similar themes and decided that the option of creating different screens in different scenes was not suitable for us. This would not allow for the required smoothness of switching between screens and would make it very difficult to add transitions when they change.

We implemented something similar to scenes, but with our own means. We have a screen manager, which has its own state machine that can switch between screens. Each screen implements an interface with the Hide and Show methods and has several events of the type: OnShow, OnHide. This gave us the ability to use Mecanim to create screen transition animations and made them easier to work with.

At the beginning of development, we were faced with a difficult choice: use well-known libraries that simplify 2D development (for example, ngui), or take a risk and try to implement everything using the newly appeared Unity UI system. We chose the latter and almost didn’t regret it, although in the end the game turned out to be a mixture of sprite (used in the gameplay itself) and canvas (used in the menu, header, tooltips).

The application is extremely simple. There are 7 game screens in total, which correspond to 7 controllers - MonoBehaviour. On the one hand, they subscribe to events from invisible objects, for example, to game store events. On the other hand, if necessary, they create pop-up windows and dialogs, control sounds and music.

A little about the libraries used. We selected plugins based on the following characteristics:

● the plugin is developing, there is a community - Unity does not stand still, you don’t want to face the problem of incompatibility of the old version of the plugin with the new Unity and the lack of desire of developers to upgrade the plugin;

● the plugin is free, or there is a “free” (shareware) version for testing - buying a plugin only to understand that it is not suitable did not suit us;

● open source - not a prerequisite, but highly desirable. Sometimes you urgently need to fix some found bug, and spending a week waiting for changes from developers is not always possible.

To store data, we use JSON, which is easy to view with your eyes and easy to export from the reaction editor. To work with JSON inside Unity, our choice fell on JSONObject - it has everything you need and has a fairly high operating speed; it automatically processes a list with a history of reactions, consisting of 2-3 thousand elements, in less than one second.

Android Immersive Mode- this is a very small but very important plugin that increases the player’s immersion in the game; Accordingly, the time spent in the game increases. This is a required plugin for Android, so I had to dig a little into the sources and add “#if UNITY_ANDROID”: without them, the plugin prevented me from building the project for iOS. Immersive mode is a mode in which your program is shown to the user in full screen, while no system panels are visible, including the navigation bar.

Facebook can be used as a universal solution. Linking a player to a Facebook account allows you to publish achievements via the Graph API. Additionally, social media can be used to connect with the player. In the case when a player has several devices (for example, a Windows laptop, an Android tablet and an iOS phone), it is most convenient to authorize through social networks. The FB team has made life much easier for developers by releasing a plugin for Unity. Authorization/sharing - everything works out of the box.

DOTween– all animations inside the application are made using standard Unity, Mecanim and occasionally legacy animations, but the movement of elements in a spiral during reactions turned out to be easier to do with third-party plugins; for this, before the movement begins, several points are created along which DOTween builds a path for the object to move.

Soomla- “showcase”, which allows you to connect the program to several “markets” at once: Google Play Market, iTunes App Store, Amazon Appstore, Windows Phone Store. In our opinion, this is the only plugin that combines support for so many stores, has a good community, is rapidly developing, and is also free.

The library was used to translate the application SmartLocalization. There are sources on Github, a lot of positive reviews in the asset store. There is export/import to csv, it works almost without any comments. Initially, the translation of elements was carried out in the element editor, but then an export was quickly written into XML that was understandable for SmartLocaliztion.

Response.addHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8") def xml = new MarkupBuilder(response.writer) xml.root() ( for (def o: objects) ( data([" name": o.key, "xml:space": "preserve"]) ( value(o.value) ) ) response.writer.flush()
Next, the translations were imported into the Unity environment and edited on site. Thanks to this, it was possible to see if the translated text was out of bounds somewhere, and how everything would look in the end.

Art style

After the list of game elements became known, two of our artists began working on the graphic design.

The first step was to draw several sketches of game windows to decide on the appearance of the game. As a result, the main colors in the design of the game were light gray tones and khaki, so that small text was easy to read, illustrations on a light background were clearly visible, and shades of green evoked associations in the player with a tank theme.

Having chosen a suitable visual style, we began to draw the remaining interface windows and at the same time work on illustrations of objects. It was decided to depict tanks and other objects in a comic book style to match the simple mechanics and general mood of the game. For tonal transitions, strokes were used instead of gradients (we borrowed this technique from illustrations of old technical literature). In order for the small details of the tank to be visible on the phone screen, we enlarged them slightly in the illustrations; the chosen style did not contradict this.

Once ready, the graphical content was transferred to the programmers and miraculously appeared in the game. Day after day, the number of elements in the game grew. Subsequently, each tank acquired a camouflage pattern, which diversified the game graphics.

All animation in the game was made in Unity, which suited both programmers and artists. Artists liked the convenience of working with a timeline window similar to that of Adobe AfterEffects or Photoshop CS6, and programmers liked the lack of need to look for ways to import animation into Unity.

Voice acting

At the beginning of development, we took the voice acting and music from our other project. We commissioned the final version from a freelancer. When he provided the first voiceover options, it turned out that the sounds differed in duration. Worst of all, their duration was different from the sounds we used and, therefore, did not suit the animation. At this stage, we gave the freelancer an application with the provided set of sounds. Subsequently, all sounds were normalized for duration and volume, and several new voice-over ideas were proposed.

Readiness No. 1 and release

As a result, by combining all these parts, we got our game. Next, the assembled application was sent for testing to go through fire and water. Testing was carried out on more than 30 different devices. As a result, we had to compress some pictures, since only the artist could notice the difference by eye anyway - this saved us about 40MB of RAM. Then we combined element pictures with sprite sheets, which reduced the number of draw calls from ~430 to ~80. Added removal of objects located outside the scene, although they were not visible, each of them added additional draw calls. The game currently runs well on the iPhone 4, and runs on Android with 512MB of RAM.

Now that the vigilant and meticulous testers are happy with everything, all that remains is to upload the application to various trading platforms and wait for the exciting moment of launch.

Try to immerse yourself in the wonderful era of the first half of the twentieth century, when tanks turned from huge monsters into real war heroes.