Dethtank gets a new look

With most of the core engine development in place, I thought I’d better turn my attention this week to the graphics. If I’m planning to sell this thing I obviously can’t keep on using the sprites I ripped from Assault that I’ve been working with so far. Call me crazy, but I’m somewhat allergic to being sued into oblivion…

This presented a small problem, in that I have all the artistic talent of a medium sized houseplant. I got around this in the finest programmer-art tradition of going with a minimalist glowy Tron-alike artwork style, as seen below

  

To get a decent flip animation for the tank, I spent the day teaching myself to use Blender Several hours of rage and swearing later I managed to get a pretty decent tank put together, made a simple animation of it rotating, and rendered it as sprites for the game.

Now that I’m fully legal with my graphics, the job for the week ahead is gonna be to get some more interesting opposition in there (the little running dudes are fun to squish, but they don’t exactly put up much of a fight). Along with that, I need to get some sound in there, and possibly some kind of soundtrack.

The plan is to get some sort of demo/beta version out there by next weekend, which will give me a couple of weeks to deal with any feedback, finish adding the game content, and hopefully start to build a bit of buzz to give me half a chance of selling a couple of copies when it’s released.