Ironclad Blitz

Defend your nation!  

Ironclad Blitz puts you in the shoes of a top tank commander given a prototype tank that is hoped to be able to end the war once and for all. Pilot your steel behemoth through large expansive levels full of detail toward victory! But be careful, your nation isn't the only one to create new and powerful beasts.

Controls

You play as the commander of a new and powerful tank, controlling all parts of the tank's movement using WASD to move around. You will go through different levels where you will be tasked with different objectives from destroying all enemies in an area to defending an area from attack. Of course to destroy enemies you will need to shoot them, which comes from your main cannon which fires using your left click. If you ever need to pause during the game make sure to press R.

Enemy Overview

Enemies come in 3 different flavors, stationary turrets that simply stay put and shoot at you, light/medium tanks, and heavy tanks. The main difference between the 2 tank types is simply how strong they are. We wanted to also include massive boss-like tanks that are more akin to a base on tracks, however for the sake of time due to the many issues we faced during development we were unable to get to them.

Environment and Level Design

Our goal with the level design was to make large expansive levels that gave the player the feeling that there was a war going on in an actual place. This meant that the levels had to be more than a flat plain with a few tanks there, instead, we wanted it to feel like you were fighting in areas where people may live in normal times. To accomplish this we made sure to populate our levels with small villages and cities. We also wanted to make sure that the game never felt like you were simply moving down a single path with no room to explore things, to accomplish this we made sure when building the levels to make them large enough that the player never felt trapped in, while also ensuring they were never trapped on a single path, if they faced an obstacle in their path there was always a way around.

Art Direction

Aesthetically we wanted Ironclad Blitz to feel like a familiar setting, without giving it any defined time period or location. To accomplish this we designed our tanks and custom assets to be a mixture of both WW1 and WW2 style tanks with some looking like something that wouldn't be too out of place in a modern setting.

Ironclad Blitz Post-Mortem

When we started planning for our game, our initial goal was to create a mechanically simple game executed with a high amount of polish. We wanted to make a very solid third-person tank game where the player controls a tank and drives around a large and well-decorated level accomplishing varied objectives. However, we encountered many obstacles during the development of this project. Despite this, I believe that we did a great job of accomplishing our goal of making solid expansive levels that were well decorated and felt lived in even though we were limited by a variety of technical issues, both personal and group affecting.

The tech issues were very persistent and pervasive. While we were able to calm them down for a while between check in 1 and 3, at the start and the end we ran into many, many tech issues. We at times had major issues pushing changes through GitHub, were forced to re-import the terrain asset pack several times, and at times the project was unable to be open, and scripts, sprites, and prefabs were constantly getting lost and had to be reimplemented manually (luckily we got into the habit of backing all of these up fairly early). These issues really hamstrung development as it meant that every hour of work by someone was typically followed by two hours of the group doing tech support for one another. 

The second major issue of our development was present from the start. When we decided to create a 3rd person tank game, a large part of the reason we made that decision was because of a package we found, full of tank prefabs, physics and even tools for creating your own tanks using the package. We figured we could use this as a tool to help us make an incredibly polished experience, but after development went underway, we realized that we didn’t want to rely too heavily on using a package this expansive. At the time, we thought we were going to use the package to enhance our own abilities, but none of us had any intentions of using unfair assets. We quickly changed course and started making our tanks from scratch after about the first week, and in the process had to limit our scope for the project.

Overall, this project still went well despite the issues we faced. Our group did a phenomenal job at continually working on the assignment in intervals and doing work we planned throughout the week rather than procrastinating. A lot of our success with the project can be traced back to our excellent communication and teamwork. If we were able to change anything about our work on the final project, it would probably be changing our game idea to one where we would be able to showcase our capabilities better and not get hung up on the asset pack. We learned the importance of early planning with this project as we eventually did not use any of the asset pack. It would have helped us immensely to sit down and go over how the process was going to go early, rather than jumping into tasks and realizing what wasn’t working after we’d already done it. Nevertheless, we are thankful for the lessons this project gave us about development with a team, and we’re happy with what we delivered in Ironclad Blitz.