Games Armored Squad - team shooter with mechs, robots and tanks

Hey there!

I'm happy to announce the game I'm currently working on.

Armored Squad - is a team shooter with mechs, robots and tanks featuring 60 single player levels and a cross-platform online multiplayer.

target platforms are: IOS, Android and PC

at the time we have:

• Online multiplayer with 6 game modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the flag, Control Points, Bomb Delivery, Mechaball ( football / soccer with mechs)
• single player campaign with 60 levels. You can choose from 20 types of bots to buy for your team and manage their behaviour.
• 16 playable mechs
• More than 100 items to customize your mech: armor plates, rocket lauchers, mortars, jump jets, melee weapons, force field generators, sentry guns and so on.
• 30 types of main weapon for mech - from machine guns and grenade launchers to lasers and plasma guns.
• 10 ranks to achieve - from Private to General of the Army

site: www.ArmoredSquad.com
twitter: https://twitter.com/NinjaStealthDev
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArmoredSquadGame/
vk: https://vk.com/public150361772
indiedb page: http://www.indiedb.com/games/armored-squad

The game has been released on Android, IOS and Steam ( PC).

Google Play : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FoxForceGames.ArmoredSquad

IOS: https://itunes.apple.com/ru/app/armored-squad-mechs-vs-robots/id1315724493?mt=8

Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/786280/Armored_Squad/

Thank you for the attention

 

Ok, once it is a wip developement forum, I thought I would share some of my findings during the work.

This week I decided to make several short videos of gameplay and also combine some of cutscenes with gameplay videos to show them as trailers.

Some time ago I used to work with Adobe Premiere as a non-linear video editor. And the program is great, no doubts about that. But they moved to the description model and I can't say I'm a huge fan of that. So I decided to search for some free replacement software, and came across blender.

Blender is a 3d modelling / animation software, but just in case some of you may not know it, it also can be used as a video editor. I tried it several times but found it to be very counter intuitive.

This time I decided to be more patient, and search for some tutorials across the web.

Here's the guy who teaches step by step exactly what I was looking for: how to use Blender as a NLE video editor.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjyuVPBuorqIhlqZtoIvnAVQ3x18sNev4

Just thought I can recommend this series of lessons to anyone who have the same problem as I do.

And Blender is not that bad. Actually I found it to be very convinient after some time

 

Despite he likes to give strange orders, Boss is a cool guy.

He is the 4-th level robot, wich gives him ability to eqip swords, lasers, double rocket launchers and jump jets of the 3rd level.

 

Made couple of new mechs for the red team

 

Another gameplay video, mechs duel

Sometimes another mechs challenge you for a duel. Those are special mechs that are much stronger than usual enemies. They also have personality: name, portrait and dialog sentences for different events in the game.

Instead of trying to follow game rules ( like trying to capture the flag in CTF mode) they will search you on the battlefield each time after respawn.

The duel continues until one of duelers will be defeated 3 times. If you win, you get spare parts of destroyed mech. Theese parts can be used to assemble new playable mechs from blueprints. And blueprints are hidden here and there around levels.

 

After several years of using Unity and pressing printscreen and then ctrl+V in the Photoshop - I finally managed to write couple of lines to make screenshots

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. //this should be placed somewhere in update function on some persistent gameObject
3. //in my case this is GameManager, the object that exists in every scene troughout the game.
4. #if UNITY_EDITOR
5.         if (Input.GetButtonDown("Screenshot"))
6.         {
7.             CaptureScreenshot();
8.         }
9. #endif
10.    
11.  
12.     void CaptureScreenshot()
13.     {
14.         var assetsPath = Application.dataPath;//project-path/assets
15.         var filePath = assetsPath.Substring(0, assetsPath.Length-7) + "/Screenshots/"; //project-path/screenshots/
16.         if(!System.IO.Directory.Exists(filePath))//create directory for the screenshots if it's not present
17.         {
18.             System.IO.Directory.CreateDirectory(filePath);
19.         }
20.         var fileName = "Screenshot_";
21.         var fileExt = ".png";
22.         int i = 1;
23.         var fullFileName = filePath + fileName + i.ToString() + fileExt;
24.         while (System.IO.File.Exists(fullFileName))//find a unique index for a screenshot name
25.         {
26.             i++;
27.             fullFileName = filePath + fileName + i.ToString() + fileExt;
28.         }
29.  
30.         Application.CaptureScreenshot(fullFileName);
31.         Debug.Log("Screenshot saved to " + fullFileName + "\n");
32.     }
33.  

Couple of thoughts:

• variable filePath should be initialized one time and not on creation of every screenshot ( but this is the editor-only script, so whatever).
• instead of adding unique index to the file name, it could be more usefull to add time stamp with System.DateTime.Now

 

I challenged myself to refactor 20 player's mechs for 48 hours. Right now 3 mechs are ready, 17 to go. 40 hours remains

 

Couple of new mechs

 

Yet another cutscene for the game:

 

New humanoid mech for the game

 

Looking good

 

Thanks! Here's another one

 

Added 16 new mechs in the game. Which one is your favorite?

 

Made backgrounds more colorfull and added some abstract objects to them:

 

I wrote a simple maxscript tool to help me unwrap models.

Most of the models in the game are not affected by any lighting, and that "flat shaded" effect is simulated by texture. The texture is just a palette of 256 colors and each poly is unwrapped to a certain color. I got tired grabbing uv's by hand and made this simple tool to simplify the process.

I don't mind to share, so if someone needs it, just let me know.

 

Looking good so far.
That unwrapping tool looks really cool!

 

I've been told to use vertex colors instead of such mapping. And to be honest, if you have such simple graphics, you should probably consider that. In my case there're too many models done already, so I'll continue with texture maps but will consider using vertex colors in my future projects from the beginning.

 

New gameplay video with new weapons, mechs and enhanced visuals:

 

New mech selector screen now adjust it's background to fit the color of the selected mech

 

Select screen looks awesome!
well done.

 

I wonder how the game would look and feel if youd change the colorscheme to a black and whitish one with only little hints of color (like some red in the UI, or faction logos on the mechs or so) and adding some "dirt" to it. You basically had two different games

(Edit, I'm following this WH40K fanwork and it gives me the chills)

 

The video is looking great but I believe that black and white style fits something serious more. My game is humorous arcade, I think that bright colors is way to go.

 

Totally agree, I was just thinking loud

 

Hey Guys!

Currently there're 4 game modes in the game:

• Arena - player alone in deathmatch against waves of enemies
• Capture The Flag - self explanatory I guess
• Control Points - you have to capture all control points on a map in the right order
• Bomb Delivery ( attack and deffense) - deliver the bomb to the enemy's base or don't let them deliver it to your base

right now I have 60 playable levels and out of ideas what to do next. I feel that the game have to propose more to player but it should be something new.

Does anyone has an idea of new game mode I could implement ?

I would be very grateful for any suggestions

 

Meanwhile I continue to work on making more pieces of equipment for mechs

 

But the most exciting news is probably that we finally have online multiplayer. Here's the first wip footage:

 

Nice job, this looks like a lot of fun and the character designs look great!

Something that bothers me is the lack of a crosshair for aiming, although I don't really know how aiming works haha. Will it be controlled by mouse/keyboard for PC or targetted at controllers? It might be personal preference but I think a crosshair would feel nice.

I feel like the character designs are on a different level compared with the environment. Are they using a different shader? It's hard to make out the edges of the walls etc which I find quite distracting. e.g. around 0:42 in your latest video, the red wall kind of blends together. Maybe it's just too bright, I dunno but something about it bothers me.

I kind of agree here, but mainly for the background. In your original post you have an image of 2 mechs against a white background and this really grabbed my attention. However in game, up against all the other bright colours in the background, the mechs don't stand out so well and don't have that same effect.

These are just my opinions anyway. Keep up the good work!

Edit: One more thing! It would be cool if when the mechs "died", their limbs/attachments broke apart instead of disappearing. But I understand if you're trying to keep the physics to a minimum for mobile.

 

Thank you for the feedback, it is very useful and highly appreciated!

The game support two types of controls for pc, mouse/keyboard and gamepad. I mostly test it on gamepad though. Thanks for the crosshair idea, will put it onto my tasks list.

Pretty much all models in the game use the same shader, which is just a flat color. Grounds also recieve shadows, all other models don't. Mechs models have more details than the environment models does. I'm "gameplay-first" type of guy and visual design is not my strongest point. Once I'll have the gameplay put together I'll probably will have to return and work on the environments.

I do have raggdols for dying enemies in the single player. Looks like this:

This kind of effect is definitely planned for all player mechs as well. Will need to test how it affects performance on mobiles though, you're right.

Thanks again!

 

Looks cool. The gameplay. Ah I miss Twisted Metal so much. This remind me back.
The art can be improve to make things easier differentiating between environment and player.
You know MaxScript? Amazing! I would like to make some simple buttons but don't know how to write.
Scale selected UV up / down 0.5 by pivot position (0.5, 0.5) and move UV up / down / left / right 0.25.
Ya you guess it right. I'm making texture atlas manually. Can you teach me? Haha.

 

@AndreiKubyshkin Awesome, that death animation is exactly what I meant haha. Totally agree with visuals last, I do the same!

 

Thanks for the comment!

I'm not hell of a teacher, sorry. But the max documentation is very straightforward, you shouldn't get lost. All I can suggest is that you'd use unwrap uvw modifier methods instead of trying to access to uv's via poly or mesh methods. Those last two have some limitations.

 

@AndreiKubyshkin I viewed MaxScript API documentation but still no clues.
I tried to copy & paste some code from official but still return errors.
Haha. You see. When it's about programming. I'm totally stupid.
Maybe I will go find some YouTube practical video tutorial then.
Ya I always use Unwrap UVW modifier to unwrap UV since 7 years ago.

 

I don't mean the modifier itself. I mean when you'll make your script, I suggest you to make ui manipulations via unwrap uvw modifier scripting.

 

New progress on multiplayer!

all 24 weapons is working now, and also jump jets, boosters, melee weapons, damage boosters. Working on adding everything else that is in single player mode

 

Strange things happens today in Armored Squad

 

New mortar equipment is now available in multiplayer mode:

 

Still working on a deathmatch. Added: homing missiles, force and healing fields generators, ragdolls for all playable mechs, frag notifications.

I know this kind of updates seems like not a big deal, but I work really hard adding all that stuff. The thing is this I rebuild all prefabs from scratch and not using any single-player code at all. Basically all the code for multiplayer is new. I don't want to touch anything in single player while it works

Strange approach probably but I had some bad experience with my previous game. I trusted various UNET videos where they were promising that turning a single player game into multiplayer one is fun and easy. I spent a month of work and became in a hell of everything breaking here and there in both modes. So I decided to revert changes and stay with single player only. My players felt themselves fooled. Won't do things like that again.

 

Ok, sentry guns are working now:

 

Great game! I get here through your post's signature, and I'm happy I did. Game looks very plabable, I'm really waiting for a realease to check it.

 

Thank you very much!

I haven't posted updates for some time. Game became much better since then. Now we have all team modes in multiplayer, and I also started to replace old environmental objects. Will post updated screenshots / videos asap.

 

The short video that is showing current progress on multiplayer gameplay:

For those who interested here's the uncut 3 minutes long video of us playtesting the new CTF map. Enjoy

 

New video of us playtesting the Bomb Delivery game mode in multiplayer:

 

I decided to abandon top-down camera support and it allowed me to make more interesting levels for the game.

Today I have two video to show. One is where we're playing, and another where I'm making a level for the game. Hope it can be interesting for someone

Thanks for watching!