DinoTank | website

Dino Tank - Race to Extinction

Genre: Action - Arcade (PVP Shoot Em' Up)

Platform: Mobile(Android & iOS)

Duration: In Production

Team: 12 Members

Tools Used

MS Project

MS Excel

Google

Docs

Unity

Autodesk
Maya

Autodesk
Mudbox

Role

Primary: Game Designer | Multiplayer Designer

Secondary: Level Designer

Responsibilities

Leading the design team on this IP.
Designed the economy system (includes IAPs, ad monetization models, soft - premium - hard currency).
System Design (player progression, attributes systems, levels system) for both single player and multiplayer modes.
Designed and defined AI behavior (View cones, sensory systems and configuration systems).
Designed boss fights for Single Player mode.
White box level design in Unity using pro builder plugin.
Level design using Unity Terrain and props created in Mudbox and Maya to create space for each level.
Constantly testing game features and levels to ensure desired design is being integrated.
Created feature test plans which every designer, artist, programmer and producer on the team would follow every time a build was released.
Created build notes for every build along with developers for rest of the team,

Dino Tank: Race to Extinction

Dino Tank: Race to Extinction is a 3D Multiplayer shoot em' up game. You get to drive tanks around and blow stuff up, but not only just tanks, you have dinosaurs driving these tanks! You have a wide range of selection for tanks from Shermans to T34s to a Churchill and a variety of Dinosaurs such as the Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, the legendary T-Rex and many more to pick from! Each of these Tanks come with their own unique attributes such as Speed, Defense and Attack and the Dinosaurs have their respective special skills which can be used during combat.

Dino Tanks has both Single Player as well as Real Time Multiplayer modes across Android and iOS devices. The single player mode is more objective based versus Multiplayer is more focused on PVP battles and has sub modes such as Team Deathmatch, CTF and Domination. The game has several levels such as Lava, Arctic, Grasslands, etc which offer a dynamic experience with level spacing and environment design.

Experience

Dino Tank is as good as my baby as I have been a part of this project from the very concept phase. I have been very passionate about this project since the very beginning and still am as it's still in production. The idea sparked with a discussion over World War II and the armed forces that were involved, from there the discussion led to how many tank shoot em ups exist on the playstores. Roy Papp (Founder of Zygobot) shared common interests in Tanks and Dinosaurs and came up with the idea of merging both of them, where we had dinosaurs driving tanks and blowing things to ashes. We brainstormed over the concept of having multiple tanks and dinosaurs, each with their unique attributes and powers and drafted out an action plan.

The brainstorming for the game went on for a week and a half to two weeks and we finally decided over the features, mechanics, gameplay, controls and target audience. We decided to design and develop the game for casual and mid core audience who enjoy playing games on their mobile devices. The control schemes were designed keeping in mind a range of target audience from ages 10 to 35.

The game was set into production and we were focusing on creating the multiplayer experience first. As the lead designer on the team I started documenting the GDD along with systems, economy and level design and was assisted by two other designers who helped with the level design of all 5 levels. 1 month into production and designing levels I realized that designing levels using Unity's default terrain tool wasn't the best approach as each level was roughly about a 100,000 polygons and our devices would crash while testing due to over heating issues. Hence, we decided to design the levels in Mudbox and Maya and integrate them into Unity. We managed to optimize the game drastically from giving us a frame rate of 13 FPS to 63 and 64 FPS on android devices. 6 months into production, the focus had to be shifted from multiplayer to single player due to business decisions, hence I had to create a new economy system and design new game modes such as survival, tower defense and search & destroy for the Single Player experience.

I learnt a lot in Unity, scripting events within levels using C#, using the pro builder plugin in unity for quick prototyping and white boxing. Most importantly, I learnt a lot from each member on the team as all of us were from differnt cultures and backgrounds.

VISHWAJEET KALE