My newest game project, KnifeTank, is now live! The game was created over a series of weekends and evenings with some friends of mine as a part of BoingBoing’s chiptune challenge. It’s full of stylish pixel art, hand drawn water color sketches, and an original music soundtrack that ties the game all together. It’s free and addictive, so I hope all my friends give it a try.
Although the game is inspired by an inside joke from about a year ago, I designed the game’s bounce puzzle/music switching mechanic right after reading the post about the contest. The animated gif at the top of the post is actually the first sketch I made to show the gameplay to my friends.
I posted about the challenge on Twitter and quickly got responses from friends wiling to work on the project together. The bulk of the game’s design work was done a few days later at Noisebridge in San Francisco. Lilia did a ton of prep work before we got together, then Brian and Erik picked various aspects to tackle throughout the day. Mike was at another table work on the game’s pixel art and Morgan (aka Crashfaster) was on the couch creating the framework for all of the game’s chiptune soundtrack.
Knowing we wanted to make a web based game, we decided to go with Processing.js, which was a good decision. Though HTML5 is still far from standardized, Processing turned out to be great for programming in. After spending about almost a year working on our last game, for my day job, it was so gratifying to see my tank art moving around collision points in just a few hours.
Although Knifetanks.com is live, we hope to polish it up more, add more levels, characters, and maybe even two player support. Crashfaster and I are also working on a KnifeTank album with the 4 chiptune tracks we created, as well as remixes, and a new rap song by Beefy and I. For anyone interested, we used midiNES on a Nintendo Entertainment System to create the chiptune soundtrack.
We had a blast working on the game, and I’m actually hoping to work on some more KnifeTank projects for different devices soon, but things are ramping up on our next Tribal Games project, so I’ll probably be a busy until that’s released.
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