Mini Tank Arena is a third-person over-the-shoulder style multiplayer game. Two teams of 4 (max players) fight for supremacy in the arena. Choose from a myriad of tanks to represent you in battle. Each tank have different roles, from being in charge of supporting other tanks to being the primary damage dealer in your team. Think about your team composition as well as your combat strategies to dominate your opponents.
Contributions
Unreal Engine 5
Led the design on the main gameplay mechanics in the game:
Moving, shooting, and aiming.
Programmed the base multiplayer framework.
Prototyped the base character and its mechanics.
Prototyped the base weapons and projectiles.
Balancing stats and overall pace of the game.
Combat Design Balance
When I first pitched the idea for MTA, I had already decided on a role-based PvP Combat experience. I wanted the players to work together and formulae a strategy with different style of tanks. Hence I was able to prototype tanks with vastly different abilities and roles in the battlefield. Some have destructive powers, some others have better defensive capabilities, while others excel in support.
Prototyping Multiplayer System
Before designing any gameplay, one of my responsibilities was to set up the ability to host a server and let anyone with the same executable be able to search and join the server using the Steam online subsystem.
It was important to take care of this first because replication in Unreal needs to be understood from the beginning. A lot of thinking went into figuring out what needs to be client sided and what needed to be transmitted to the server for permission.
I was able to use blueprints that are not normally used in single player games such as game states and player states, while understanding how the hierarchy between the game-mode, player controllers and UI are set up and connected.
Aiming
I prototyped various forms of the aiming ability. However we started having problems with overloading the client because the aiming system was spawning and deleting too many instances of meshes at a time. I ended up using a Niagara effect together with the aiming logic to spawn a single VFX line that would shoot out of the player’s tank canon.