Features & Plans

[DarkAuron]

The following posts are just past posts of features and updates collaborated into one topic so that people can easily see what's in store without having to read 6+ pages of posts to get it all. Plus I can read this topic to remind myself what I still need to do

Now, for a listing of the features of Tankies!


::Current features already completed::
-New menu system that puts Menu() to shame, with animated selection cursor and extended functionality.
-Scrollable help screen for controls info.
-Changeable options, including: Enabling/Disabling of special screen closing and opening effect when loading and exiting gameplay; 'Hidden' shots that are invisible until they hit something.. meant to challenge those who are insane; Changeable gravity from 3 different values
-3 Landscape modes to choose from: Random, Island, and Mountain
-'Secret' options menu: details unknown
-Moveable tank during gameplay (soon to be limited movement per turn)
-Able to die by suicide, attack from enemy, or falling off the landscape to the pits of LCDless
-Angle and power control for shots
-Destroyable landscape!
-..and anything else that hadn't been mentioned


::Features originally planned for completion of Tankies, yet to be implemented::
-Wind that affects shots, and changes every now and then during gameplay
-A second tank to fight with, either AI or 2nd player.


::Extra features recently thought of that will probably be found in Tankies at a website near you (or something)::
-Different tanks to choose from, from the following (listed are also the pros and cons of each):
--Shooty:
---Pro: can shoot farther and shots are less affected by wind, and can move much further
---Con: has less health, does less damage, and has smaller explosions from its shots
--Powy:
---Pro: has more health, does more damage, and has much larger explosions from shots
---Con: can't shoot very far and shots are heavily affected by wind; also can't really move much
--Tanky:
---Pro: average of the above two tanks
---Con: has no specialties
-Pre-made landscapes generated from equations
-Landscapes that can be instantly created from Pic files; Pic files can be supplied quickly and easily be anyone, however the top 15 or so rows cannot have anything in them, except possibly a design within unused parts
-Adjustable AI level for enemy AI tank
-Stats system that records hit % average for all games, total games won and lost (single player only).
-Special one-time use shots for each tank.
-And possibly more will be thought of in the future!

[DarkAuron]

A little update on Tankies; I've got bigger plans for custom Pic landscapes.. here's a list of them:

-On the landscape selection screen, where it displays Random, Island, and Mountain as selections, there'll be a horizontal selection for pre-equated landscapes that I created at the bottom. Better details will be visible once I fully implement that.

-At first you'll only have two pre-generated landscapes availible; the more matches you win, the more landscapes you'll unlock. Of course, the later landscapes will be more interesting looking (in my opinion) and will be more complex. They'll still be generated from random stuff, but the rendering will be more involved. Oh, and by pre-generated/equated, I mean it's not totally random; it's a set equation (or equations/with small functions) with a slight bit of randomness to it, but unlike Random, Island, and Mountain, they're not 80%+ random.

-Since kv83 asked about tanks having to shoot their way out before they can attack each other, I thought of how I could make this still work for custom landscapes, and it hit me: why not have some fun with binary and make binary numbers in image data, at parts of the screen so the tanks can spawn from those numbers? Okay, that's a lot to process, so check this image. The tank of the left has coordinates 15,38 and the one on the right has coordinates 73,38. The binary at the top has the same values; from the top, the X value, then the Y value. Will the user have to make this value? No, and that's where I get to the next part.

-A landscape editor! But it'll be external, so people that don't care to make levels won't have to waste any space for it Anyhow, these are features I plan to make in the editor:

--In the editor, with a single-pixel cursor the user can create a tank spawn spot. I've got several ideas on how that'll work after having made spawn positions, but selecting a spot will generate the binary image data at the top of the landscape screen.

--The cursor will flash on and off indefinitely, and if you've ever used my Image Edit program, you'd be familiar with it.

--Unlike Image Edit, the landscape editor will have extended functionality; horizontal and vertical line drawing from a simple press of the button, but not the entire line; there'll be a left horizontal button and right horizontal button, which draw from the left or the right of your cursor, depending on which you pressed. The same concept is for the vertical, being up and down.

--Another feature is, and you probably wondered about this, being able to switch from on/off. This means you can erase or draw, white or black, off or on. The display for what it's switched to will be placed where the text "Wind" is displayed in-game (which isn't implemented yet.. grr. maybe I'll do that tonight..).

--Everything will be checked and things can be undone, slightly. Pic9 and Pic0 will be used for the editor, which means you're limited to 8 landscapes at once. But that's okay, right?

--Either in the main program or the editor, Pic files can be switched/copied from one another.

[DarkAuron]

The menu system is no longer going to be on the homescreen, at all. In fact tankies will no longer touch the homescreen. This allows for many effects, such as...
-Text 'stretching', where the text stretches from the left to the right. Can't really explain it without showing, which I can't do right now.
-Background landscape. Yep, a randomized landscape will be generated when tankies starts (this can be disabled in the options menu) and shown in the background of all the menus.
-Animated spinning tank cursor for menu selections. This brings a greater atomsphere and better visual effect for Tankies.
-More room for text and menu selections. Since the Text( functions spits out smaller text (unless I added -1..), I've got more room to play with, so I don't have to make slow scrolling routines to scoll down to display everything.

I'm also going to make the help menu multi-paged, instead of scrolling you'd basically turn to the next page and see the next section of help. This makes it more organized and faster to go through.

[DarkAuron]

I got an idea for additional modes, like a practice mode where you shoot a target (or more than one) and get graded on your accuracy. Just an idea..

[DarkAuron]

I've decided to have the following for weapon types:
-A power meter will go up a small amount every turn, and will be used up on varying amounts depending on which weapon you use. You can use 2nd to use the default bullet shot, which uses basically no power.
-However if you want real damage and landscape ripping action, you'll want to use one of the Special shots; there's 5 per tank and each is unique to the three tank types, making a total of 15. Each one doesn't necessarily do more damage from using more collected power, but generally they'll do special landscape-destroying actions in quite a crazy way
-The special shots can be used by pressing one of the top 5 buttons (Y=, WINDOW, ZOOM, TRACE, and GRAPH). The tank selection screen will tell you how much power each one uses for each of the tanks, and if you try to use one in gameplay but don't have enough, you'll get a message saying you lack the power.
-The health meters are vertical whilst the power meters are horizontal.
-And uh.. making these special shots will be interesting and fun to do

As for additional modes, I'll either add a new option on the main screen or allow you to switch to a different page on the landscape selection screen. You know.. stuff like Practice Mode, Accuracy Competition, Landscape Sandbox (create and destroy a landscape using any and all of the special shots without restrictions), etc.

[DarkAuron]

Theres going to be a Stats Page with statistics and unlockables, values which will be encoded and if improperly modified, Tankies will reset the list. How it works I'm not going to explain for *obvious* reasons It's already implemented as a selection on the main screen, with all other options working just fine.

[DarkAuron]

The power meter will be drawn under the Angle text, ontop the lines I've drawn to seperate the info from the gameplay. Those lines won't be drawn on custom landscapes though, as the landscape designers may want to do little designs around the text like I did, maybe even more complicated ones.

The landscape editor is going to be updated and bugfixed hopefully soon when I feel like working on it. Something new I'll have in it that I havn't stated before is height and width modification, so if you want to have designs AROUND the map and make the map smaller and more limited like this.