Tankbuster: the .plan

Considering the length of time (nearly on 3 months now) I've been working as an artist here at GarageGames, I think it's high time I introduced myself, and a few of the things I've been working on during my time here. As this is my first .plan, pleas bear with me.

Officially, I'm the new web/2d/marketing artist. That's pretty vague, but it means that I tend to work on a huge variety of projects. Definitely a good deal, in my opinion.

Over the past month, I've gotten to create all the art assets for a TGB tutorial entitled Tankbuster. The demo made its offical debut at Gamefest just last weekend, and ought to be showing up on the site in the near future. During the process, we also decided to get a version running on Torque X, which enabled us to do some pretty neat things graphically.


The Art of Tankbuster
At the start of the project, I was planning on using Mark M's lovely bomber featured in the TGB banner (which can be found here). That plane determined the entire look of the game (squashed, Advance Wars style objects with bright, painterly colors), before I gave in to my desire to make my own plane. Although I'm not a programmer by any means, TGB was a big help in prototyping my art - I just started with the space scroller resource pack and replaced the beginning art with my own. Unexpectedly, I also found TGB to be an invaluable animation tool while I was working on the explosions. The program makes it very easy to preview an animation, which lets you go back and make any desired tweaks. The ability to use animations within the particle system was also a very useful feature.


Enter Torque X
Midway through the project, the decision was made to make a Torque X version of Tankbuster. That opened up a few new graphical options for the game, like normal mapping. The ability to make a 2D sprite react realistically to dynamic lighting was too good an opportunity to pass up, and so most of the foreground objects got a shiney normal map to give them some depth.

I'm honestly sad that the project is wrapping up. I had the amazing experience of being responsible for the look and feel of this game from the beginning. There were definite highs and lows, but getting even a small demo game finished and out the door is an incredibly rewarding feat. Adam Larson and Thomas Buscalia get big shouts out for their patience as we tried to get the handling and pacing just right.

All in all, Tankbuster is nearly done for now. There are a few graphics that still need to be made, and a few features to be implemented (player damage, score counters, etc.) before it's ready to go out as a demo. After that, I'd certainly like to revisit it at some point to add more levels, enemy types, and terrain objects - and a boss fight seems like a definity necessity. However, there are still more demos, icons, and web features to be made. Keep an eye out - GG is going to see a lot of neat stuff in the near future.

For those interested, the video of the the Tankbuster demo in action can be found here. It's about 35 minutes in.