A couple weeks ago I got to make a little on screen game for work! While I am not personally under an NDA for this work, the show is currently still in production, (and will be for some time due to the Writers and Actors still striking as of the time of writing this) so I will not say what it is for, but, I can share the game I got to work on.
I got to make a little Atari Battlezone clone!
This was a fun little project as Battlezone is probably my favorite Atari game, not that there is much competition for that spot for me, but still cool nonetheless.
I only had a couple days to put the game together in Unity. The first thing I did was bring in the 3D models made by one of our artists. This included the mountains in the background and the cone shaped tank. I made the traditional looking tank. I would have advised the mountains to be part of a skybox but they had already been made by the time I came to that conclusion. I used a wireframe shader to get that retro vector art look.
I then programmed a simple first person character controller for “driving around the tank”. I also programmed in a simple shooting mechanic to destroy enemy tanks. After that, I made the enemy tanks roam back and forth between two points to give them some life, and had them follow the player once the player got close.
That was pretty much all that was needed for the show. While I would have loved to have the enemies shoot back at the player and have sfx of the tanks breaking into pieces once the player shot them, the clock was ticking and they needed it on set. Also it's always important to keep in mind that these types of things are often only shown on screen for a couple seconds before moving on to the next shot. Regardless, I'm glad I got to do this and I hope it makes the final cut of the show!
A side note. In the middle of working on this I also went to the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Chicago, Illinois for the first time. For those who don't know about Galloping Ghost they basically have every retro arcade cabinet that you would want to play, including Battlezone!
