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[Oasiscircle]

Let me start by saying something that is required by universal-law that you must do before you almost blatantly advertise your game onto someone else's forum. Or at least it seems that way in my head.
I'm Oasiscircle, you can call me Gary, Oasis, Circle, Turtle-guy, Cabbage-guy, or basically whatever the hell you want... guy. Okay, that was a bit excessive.

So, first off I'd like to sooth your savage rage for me by singing you a song of making-me-similar-to-you-ing.  Therefore making you less mad at me for almost blatantly advertising on someone else's forums.  Again, all in my head.

I've played Dwarf Fortress quite a lot, it used to be one of my favorite games.  I watch a lot of Dwarf Fortress Let's Plays, mostly by jefmajor if any of you have heard of him.  If not, I suggest checking him out, he's got a lot of funny stuff.  I've got a few Let's Plays of my own on Dwarf Fortress, mostly on my old channel, but my new channel has a 'early-DF-LP' I think it's version 0.23a that I played, or something.
But I'm not here to tell you about my Let's Plays, or anyone else's, I'm here to tell you something that I've been working on for the past week or so and it's turning out to be quite an interesting thing.  Interesting indeed.

Now that song of symphonic sympathy is complete.  I will now proceed to throw tons of information at a population of people whom I hope knows something about what I'm saying.  If not, I suggest going here and reading up on it a bit, especially if you like a ton of mostly free-to-play indie games made by averages people like us.

Alright!  Hopefully some of you know about BYOND!  If you do, then you also know that the defaults of the system are quite lacking, tile-based positioning with only 8 directions of movement and only 4 directions that are really used graphically in 99%+ of games.  In the recent past there's been quite a burst of pixel-based positioning, even with online capabilities which astonished many people and those games quickly rose to some of the top games on BYOND's featured list.  But these games still didn't improve on the number of directions you can move, and certainly didn't improve upon the maximum graphical directions you can turn!  We've pushed the limits, only to be stopped when we came to something new that works!  What a shame, shall BYOND forever be held within the grasp of it's old 8-directional systems?!  Well, I say, no more!  I would like to present to you, the people of the Bay12 forums and community, with Toy Tanks.  A vector-based BYOND game, it uses angles and velocities to determine direction and placement.  My systems have brought BYOND to the top-down vector era, where there are limitless positions and up to 360 USED graphical directions.  (You could do more, but there'd be such minute differences it wouldn't make a difference.)  That means seamless turns and swivels that you can ooze all of your saliva upon while you're destroying your enemies in cold-blood!  You know you want to.

Now, more about the game.  It's going to be a multiplayer battle-style game, where you join a player queue and, after more than two people have joined, precede to utterly dismantle the other players with your relentless fire of little wooden spheres.  The graphics for the game have already been completed, and the majority of the systems for the game have been complete.  I have a few videos of the game online on my Youtube channel showing some pieces of game-play and the vector system.  I'll be sure to link you to them in the topic here:

Toy Tanks - 1 - Titlescreen Preview!
Toy Tanks - 2 - Gameplay Preview!!!

And here's the hub, on the BYOND page.  You don't require BYOND to play the game but it's nice to have it, as you get a custom name rather than just being known as "Guest 2484569439324"! If you have a BYOND account, post it here so I can talk with you over pager! (:

*The Toy Tanks hub.
*My BYOND Blog.

I think that's it.  If I forget anything important, I'll update the post! (:

EDIT #1: Derp.
If you've got MSN or Skype, you're free to contact me there too!  Skype>MSN

Skype: gary.bethlehem
MSN: forcedragonslayer@hotmail.com

I'll be keeping you people updated on everything about the game and tracking this topic, so if you have anything to say to me, suggestions, comments, complaints, useless-harble-blabber, put it all in here!  I'll read and respond to the best of my ability!  Thanks for reading and have a nice day. d:

-Gary

[Knight of Fools]

Looks interesting.

Is it going to do anything groundbreaking, other than the ability to move/shoot in all 360 degrees?

[beorn080]

Bay Station 12, our SS13 server, has 10 directional movement. Unless you count stairs, since that's kinda diagonally up and down, ladders also work weird like that.

Looks to be rather advanced for BYOND. Out of curiosity, are you open sourcing the code for this?

[Duelmaster409]

Bay Station 12, our SS13 server, has 10 directional movement. Unless you count stairs, since that's kinda diagonally up and down, ladders also work weird like that.

Saying you have 10-directional movement is a bit misleading. A more appropriate way of describing it would be that players can go down and up a semi-3D station layout.

[breadbocks]

This could be done really well, and end up with SS13 levels of players 24/7, or done really poorly, and come out as a clusterfuck that nobody likes. This will be massively dependent on how you set up maps/movement speeds. Things that would seem aesthetic, but have huge amounts of impact on gameplay. The best way I can think of to permanently kick the mapping problem to the curb would be have an ingame map tool, and a player made map database which people can chose from in addition to the dev made maps for multiplayer games. And since from what I could tell of the home menu, what will single player be like?

[ductape]

My movement goes to ELEVEN.

[SHAD0Wdump]

Now that was impressive.

[Oasiscircle]

Trying to answer everyone's questions in one single post, here we go!

Is it going to do anything groundbreaking, other than the ability to move/shoot in all 360 degrees?

@Knight of Fools:

I'm not sure what else I could really add that could be groundbreaking, so if you've got any ideas that'd be awesome.
I had an idea of making the bullets bounce off of walls, but that was just an idea.

Looks to be rather advanced for BYOND. Out of curiosity, are you open sourcing the code for this?

@beorn080:

I'm not opening the game for open-source, but I'm considering creating a library on the vector-based movement, so there you go! (:

This could be done really well, and end up with SS13 levels of players 24/7, or done really poorly, and come out as a clusterfuck that nobody likes. This will be massively dependent on how you set up maps/movement speeds. Things that would seem aesthetic, but have huge amounts of impact on gameplay. The best way I can think of to permanently kick the mapping problem to the curb would be have an ingame map tool, and a player made map database which people can chose from in addition to the dev made maps for multiplayer games. And since from what I could tell of the home menu, what will single player be like?

@breadbocks: I really appreciate your kind words. (:  But this is the exact reason I need people like you!  I would release the pre-beta and people would test the movement, which I think is rather free and quick as it is right now, and then if there were any problems you could give me some feedback.  I would really like to have an in-game (or offline, it's possible) map creator.  An offline map creator would work by having players create a map offline and then make it into a savefile which they in-turn upload to the game the next time it's online.  Single Player... I -wanted- to make it that you fought against AI Tanks, but since I wanted to release pre-beta sooner than later I decided to keep AI out of the game for the time being.  As of now it's PvP. (:

Now that was impressive.

@SHAD0Wdump: Thanks! (:

[Deon]

Wow, it's a great movement system. It can be a neat arcade, maybe even great . If you need sprites, feel free to ask, I can do some in my free time (and I am sure you will find a lot of volunteers for resources on these forums). Good luck to you sir! And I would love to test it .

[Farseer]

Added you. I'll try it out. :p

Can I suggest tank load outs, maybe? So different tanks etc?

Also: Watch out for Deon. He'll produce more sprites than you could ever need. He's like a monster in terms of spriting. :p

[Knight of Fools]

Can I suggest tank load outs, maybe? So different tanks etc?

I was just about to suggest that.  Having a system where you have to balance speed, armor, and weapon velocity/damage/rate of fire would add a little more depth, even if there's just a fair layout of pre-made tanks.  Remember that people love customization, so custom maps and the ability to aesthetically fiddle with their tanks would be a big plus.

Perhaps some different multiplayer modes, too - King of the Hill, Campaign (Play across different scenarios, upgrading components every level with points earned), Swarm (Cooperative against an endless swarm of enemy tanks), or even some sort of racing game.

I hope that helps.

[breadbocks]

Now I remember what this reminded me so heavily of. Bubble Tanks. Go to kongregate or newgrounds or something and play it for a bit. Learn from what took them 3 games to perfect.

As for the map diddly-doo, I'd say make it in-game, but have the option to save the file to your hd, and add an option to the map chooser for games. Also, for the dev made maps, you might want to make the spaces the size of 2 tanks. If a tank can just barely fit through it, you've got a problem.

[Oasiscircle]

Mass-reply time again!  Huzzah!

If you need sprites, feel free to ask, I can do some in my free time (and I am sure you will find a lot of volunteers for resources on these forums). Good luck to you sir! And I would love to test it (:.

@Deon: If I were to go for the tank customization route (which I probably would) I would require a ton of different sprites for overlays.  Do you have Skype or MSN?  If so, add me so we can chat or we can talk over the forums.  Thanks for your good wishes, I hope you continue to watch this topic and game. Also, of course you can test it!

Can I suggest tank load outs, maybe? So different tanks etc?

@Farseer: Yeah!  I was thinking on including in a future version some sort of game mechanic where you at first choose your starting build, which acts as the base of the tank that has base stats, pretty simple ones and not skewed too far to any one attribute. (For instance, a base-tank wouldn't automatically have a ton of attack power, it might have a little more than the average and then have a little less in some other attribute, like speed.) After buying (and possibly painting) your base-tank and you win matches, you can go buy new parts or add-ons for your tank that increase certain attributes and negatively affect others with the points you earn from winning matches.  The only problem with this is that eventually, some tanks will become in-essence "better" than other tanks unless this is extremely well balanced.

I don't think anything like this would be planned for the pre-beta release.  Maybe a bit later, after all the base game mechanics have been verified.

Perhaps some different multiplayer modes, too - King of the Hill, Campaign (Play across different scenarios, upgrading components every level with points earned), Swarm (Cooperative against an endless swarm of enemy tanks), or even some sort of racing game.

@Knight of Fools: Sorry for being so disappointing, but as I -think- I mentioned somewhere (Maybe it was on the BYOND Blog or something, can't remember.) that the pre-beta was only going to have DeathMatch.  As soon as AI is implemented it would be possible to play Campaign and Swarm.  I especially like the Swarm idea, that'd be really fun with a group of people.  Maybe not racing game though, as it'd be really just influenced by a few attributes, turning, acceleration, and speed; so I'm probably not going to do that.  But thanks for all the ideas! (:

As for the map diddly-doo, I'd say make it in-game, but have the option to save the file to your hd, and add an option to the map chooser for games. Also, for the dev made maps, you might want to make the spaces the size of 2 tanks. If a tank can just barely fit through it, you've got a problem.

@breadbocks: In-game would totally work, because you will have an available offline-client of the game too so it'd be possible to use either.  I'd suggest using the offline one really, though, because the less the amount of server-to-player communications the better.  The dev-made maps already have that limit set! The tank's bounds are 32x32 pixels wide, while a wall or floor-tile is 16x16, so a two-space to three-space wide corridor should work fine.  Plus, I'm setting up collision to allow for collision without completely stopped movement, so people don't get stuck on walls the instant they enter the wall's bounding box.  Instead they'd simply skid on the wall and not make any movement into the wall! (:

Thanks for all your support and comments from everyone! I'm right-now working on the game so yeah, fun! (:

[Oasiscircle]

Sorry about the double-post, I really am, but this whole topic just got epic-buried beneath a ton of stuff, and because this project isn't as ultra-popular yet so it doesn't have a steady posting community. ):
I responded to everyone's comments and I also have a collision-is-perfect video up!  So that's cool, right! (:

Click here to go to the collision video!

Hope this continues the current interest.  What is shown in the video is also the speed and mobility at which a standard tank would maybe run.  Any thoughts on that?
Also: For the next two hours, until ~12:00AM US Central time I'll be chillin' in my personal-use chatroom.  If you wanna talk to me about something, anything really, in realtime, come on down! (:
Click here to go to the chatroom! (:

[Knight of Fools]

Sorry for being so disappointing, but...

It's alright.  If I were upset about a Beta game that didn't have all of its features in it, I wouldn't be playing DF.  I was just throwing ideas out there - I tend to look at games as how they can be in the future.

Also: Team Capture the Flag.  Zombie Tank - One tank starts off as a zombie and can't shoot, but is super fast and mobile.  It kills other tanks when it rams them, turning them into zombies, too.  If the zombies kill all the tanks within the time limit, they win - If the tanks hold out, they win.

Having different tilesets would be a big bonus, too - Seeing that brown arena all the time would get boring pretty quickly.  Don't be afraid to do some crazy stuff; no one expects a game with the name "Toy Tanks" to be serious.  (Unless that's what you're going for, of course.)