Tank You, Next! Update

If you have read through my projects page, you might now about my game “Tank You, Next!”. It is a project my friend Daniel and I started over a year ago for our “Software Engineering” class. Initially, the idea was that we have only an example project which we can plan on without actually developing it completely. However, Daniel and I decided that our idea is worth it to be developed completely as we really liked the idea of creating a small fun game which we could play on our LAN-parties that we regularly have with some friends. Here’s what we came up with as our vision for the game:

Two players each control one tank. You do this with the keys “W”, “A”, “S” and “D” and by using the mouse to aim and shoot. The tanks are on a (three-dimensional) platform together with some obstacles. Via a web socket, the movements of the two players are synchronized. The player who hits the other player first (or often enough), wins the game. The game can then be started again.

After the semester, we actually had the game working for two players, which was a nice prototype but not yet really usable for a LAN-party. Unfortunately, I was in Japan over the semester break, and in the following semester we invested our whole time into the Royal Tracer, which I already told you about in my last blog post.

After this semester was also finished, the date for the next LAN-party was set, and we decided to take this as our chance to invest some time and finally finish this project. We sat down for a few days and reimplemented parts of the networking to support multiple clients. Also, we fixed some bugs and added some nice features. Now, it is fully working for multiple users and can be downloaded on GitHub.

Overall, we now not only achieved our initial goal of creating our own little LAN-party game but we also managed to finish a more or less long term side project! Sadly, this is not a matter of course for side projects in general, but then the feeling is all the better once it happens!

If you are interested in more technical details of the implementation, I invite you to check out my project article about it. Apart from that, I wish you happy easter holidays and see you soon!