Retro Tanks Alpha footage

Thought I'd upload some Alpha footage of a 2 player battle from my latest XBLIG game made with MMF2 and the XNA exporter! Feel free to scrutinise, offer suggestions, etc. I'm shortly going to post a version on the XBLIG forums for testing, prior to peer review, if anyone is a member there.

The footage doesn't show too much off, as it's a first level game with no start-up bonuses to improve the tanks, but it does show the basic premise and give a taste

Retro Tanks is a 4 player local co-op tank skirmish game with plenty of features, such as game customisation, various weapons and upgrades, team-play mode, 3vs1 mode, single player time-attack game, post-game cumulative stats with ribbon awards and medals to unlock more game content, tank-builder mode to see the costs of different tank builds and plenty more.

There's around 50 maps at present which are played in either campaign mode or free level select. The campaigns are 10 levels long and dedicated to specific setups, e.g. Team-play campaign for 2vs2 games with each level carefully designed to create the best 2vs2 experience.

Hope you like what you see!

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That's fab GK - just what I was looking for.

I've hidden the non-player toolbars and am working on tidying up the toolbars as you suggest - yes, I guess it could look a bit daunting - you forget that a fresh face will be playing the game rather than the person who wrote it, and I've started many games only to be knocked back by what looks like an overly complex system.

There are certainly plenty of help menus and even a tank builder page where you can analyse all the upgrades in detail and see the costs of each upgrade (cumulatively and alone) and what they do, along with my tip for each upgrade - so once people get the basics of the game there's stacks of depth to be had with taking different upgrade routes.

The coins are indeed the mineral currency of the game used for both purchases and can also be the win condition of the game (both by total coinage and highest value of coins collected) for the pacifists our there. There are 4 types in order of rarity - abundant gold, common blue, uncommon green and rare purple. All of the upgrades and weapon purchases are carefully costed to ensure good game flow, and additionally, the coin placement in levels is carefully accounted for to make mining correctly a real bonus later on (particularly for the purples). My level designs offers lots of varying opportunities for coin mining as well. This makes purchases people choose quite an art, for example the plasma gun is a powerful weapon but costs quite a lot of purple coins which could go much further if spent on upgrades. So if you choose the plasma route, you might have the fire-power edge, but the other players might have a higher coin magnet or hull capacity, or whatever.

The first campaign (which you need to play first to unlock more content) also drip feeds game features over the course of the 10 levels - as you suggest complexity might be an issue, I might try hiding unused parts of the toolbar (e.g. the keycards, and maybe some of the upgrades/weapons) that way people can get a bit of excitement from progressing and seeing what comes up.

As for camping, your red doors can be shot through and moved through only by yourself, and your starting point rapidly heals your tank - therefore camping is a big no no, and even hanging around someone's base has been rendered pointless, as the defending player will just come out, whittle your health down a bit, dash back to reset their health. This drives the focus of the game on getting out there and mining the best blocks as quickly as possible so you can get the better upgrades.

Thanks again for watching the video and providing some useful feedback.