Hey,
The game is called Tank Hero and was developed by a two man team. We actually released this game on Android at the beginning of the year, but we recently a version for iOS with upgraded graphics.
Here are a couple of fun facts about the engine and development...
1) Performance across broad hardware:
We wanted to achieve good performance across a broad number of devices. We did several things to ensure this. The engine uses full fixed point math to support older pre-ARMv7 devices with no hardware FPUs. While this solution is not ideal for ARMv7 devices, CPU has not been a major bottleneck for us on such devices so we're willing to live with it. The game logic, input, and OpenGL are all able to run on separate threads to ensure we don't lose CPU time from block GL calls. This will obviously give us performance gains on multithreaded devices, but again CPU time hasn't been our bottleneck on high end devices.
3) Real-time shadows
For the iPhone version, we decided to improve the graphics. We considered several approaches. Shadow mapping was not feasible because we wanted shadows to emit from a point rather than being limited to a light frustum. We also considered shadow volumes, but this would require tremendous amount of CPU power to generate the number of shadow volumes we needed. In the end we decided to go with simple projected planar shadows, which limited us to only having shadows casted on the ground.
4) Productive
Because we are a two man team with a non-existent budget, we had to figure out how to develop in the most productive way possible. To achieve this, we developed emulators for our engine that run on Windows and Mac. This allowed us to develop most of the game on desktops with only a minimal amount of work needed on the actual embedded devices.
Additional information:
* Has both OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 rendering pipelines
* Cross platform architecture (currently has build targets for Android, iOS, Symbian^3)
* Bitmap fonts for text rendering
* Offline asset processing tools (takes md2 and obj formats as input and outputs to custom format)
Get it on iTunes App Store!
Get it on the Android Market
Clapfoot Inc (our studio!)
Thanks for reading!
Click here to view the iotd
Tank Hero
Always a pleasure to play a popular game first and then later find out that it has roots on GD
Good work man, neat graphics! Have you thought about exporting to any consoles like the xbox live game marketplace? It would be interesting to see the controls done with a console controller
Good work man, neat graphics! Have you thought about exporting to any consoles like the xbox live game marketplace? It would be interesting to see the controls done with a console controller
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