Tic Tac Tanks Development History
How the game came to life
I’m releasing a new game on the 31st of this month. The game has been a side project of mine for slightly over a year now and the development process has been a really positive experience. I’d like to share some of the history of the project and why I think things went so well.
How it Started
Tic Tac Tanks started as a prototype for the Miziziziz 4 Game Developers, 1 Art Kit Game Jam. Miziziziz reached out to me asking if I would be interested in participating and I was.
There was a catch, though. The assets for the jam would be 3D. At the time, I had very little experience working in 3D, but I thought I’d give it a try.
Pre-production
I was immediately drawn to these Advanced Wars-like assets by maxparata and started prototyping a game around them. I also wanted to keep things simple, so I decided to base the game off of tic-tac-toe.
My first prototype was on paper and involved simple symbols representing different units and a tic-tac-toe grid. I iterated quite a bit on paper until I found something that felt interesting to me.
Once the paper prototype felt good, I moved to Godot engine to start the digital prototype. It didn’t take me too long to place some units down on a board and write some code that would let me move them around. Just picking up the units and placing them around in the world felt good.
I implemented simple actions for each unit (based on the paper prototype) and made a few levels.
The digital prototype felt even better than the paper one had. I polished it up as best I could, added a scoring system, added a few more levels, and sent the game to the other game jam participants.
The feedback on the game was overall positive. Aidan Cushing (another participant in the jam) in particular seemed to really enjoy it. I was encouraged by their enthusiasm.
Soon after the jam was over, I had a developer friend message me wanting to team up on something. I’m usually a bit of a lone wolf when it comes to these kinds of things, but Demonlocke was still my main focus, and I knew I wouldn’t have time to finish Tic Tac Tanks on my own. So, I pitched the game to him, and he agreed to finish the game with me.
Production
At this point, the systems and design of the game were all in place. The project was ready for production.
We knew we’d need new models for the project. Both of us took a stab at making some 3D models in blender but they didn’t quite turn out how we wanted. I made a tweet looking for a 3D modeler to help us with the project and we discovered Kay Lousberg. Kay was able to make some brilliant models for us and was super great to work with. I can’t recommend them enough.
It took me a bit of fiddling to get his models to look good inside of Godot, since I still didn’t have much experience with 3D, but I’m really happy with how they turned out.
We polished up the UI and added a new unit (the bomber unit), then bumped up the level count to 10. The game was ready for alpha testing.
We sent the alpha to over 100 testers and the feedback all came back quite positive. Most of the feedback was focused on quality-of-life issues.
After the polishing up the alpha, we knew it was time to finish making the levels. Originally, we had planned on 30 levels, but as I was making them, I felt the game needed more.
The problem was that we didn’t have enough interesting variety to make that many more levels. The mechanics of the game were too simple to justify more than 30 levels.
Another problem we were facing was a shield mechanic. During the alpha, the game had a shield that could be found in the level and placed on units. This shield would block 1 damage. The mechanic didn’t work, though. It was always super obvious where to put the shield, it caused glitches, and the testers thought it looked super ugly.
We brainstormed around a bit and decided to replace the shield mechanic with an armor mechanic. This would be a simple modifier that could be applied to the unit and prevent damage.
The armor idea worked great. It worked so well that we decided to implement other modifiers as well. We settled on a 2x action modifier (makes the unit move twice) and a rotation lock modifier (prevents a unit from being rotated).
With these 3 new modifiers we were able to create enough variation in the levels to fill our 50-level goal.
Once we’d completed the 50 levels, we sent out the game to a few select beta testers. Feedback was overall good, but we would need to put some work into the difficulty curve.
The beta testers also gave us a good idea of how long it would take to complete the game. It took them between 3-4 hours to complete, which is the target game length we were aiming for.
I started adjusting the difficulty curve with some help from the other developer (he made a quick program to loop through each level and estimate its complexity). The complexity value wasn’t perfect, but it gave us a starting point for organizing the levels.
I also started working on a simple trailer. I decided to make something more personal since it would be going on my YouTube channel.
Here is the trailer if you haven’t seen it yet:
Launch
We are currently working towards a March 31st, 2022 launch on itch.io. We still have some work ahead of us, though not a lot. In particular, we are working on polishing up little areas of the game.
Conclusion
I’m really proud of the game we’ve made. This game has been a side project, but it’s been a very fulfilling one for me.
I believe that the clear lines between the pre-production phase and the production phase have made this development cycle an enjoyable one for me. You can see places where we added a bit of content in pre-production, or where we implemented simple systems during production (the modifiers) but overall, the lines have been clear. The game was completely ready for production right after the jam.
Understanding the boundaries between pre-production and production is a crucial skill for any game developer. If you are interested in learning more about it, check out my YouTube video on the topic.
Thanks for reading,
Ben
[update] The game is out! Buy it now!
I look forward to this game. Would love to play on switch and my steamdeck when it cones.