Panza & Kommanda
It is a game where one team consists of a player in Virtual Reality (Oculus Rift) controlling a tank, and the other player sits in front of the PC and is the commander. With multiplayer, you can then play against another team.
Each team controls a tank, and the aim is to destroy the opponent’s tank. There are two different roles in each team: the tank driver and the commander. The tank driver is inside the tank and is responsible for maneuvering, using skills and weapons, and repairing the tank. The commander is outside the combat zone and has a tactical view of the battlefield. His task is to develop strategy and guide the tank driver, as well as to actively intervene in the battle. This is made possible by various active abilities and unlocking the tank’s available weapon systems. The core element of the game is the communication between the driver and commander, as only through active cooperation can a tactical advantage be gained over the opposing team.
This game was developed as a group project in the course “Open Realtime Games Workshop”.
Development time: 2 months
April 17, 2018
My Part
In this project, I took up the part of sound programming as well as other programming tasks that came up (gameplay, helping with networking, …).
Sound is an easy task in most cases, but we had a special case where the player’s game object was not where the player was: The inside of the tank was not where the tank was. (The VR framework had some constraints, so it was easier to leave the two spaces apart.)
I solved this problem by mirroring all sound emitters. While the tank was moving around the map, the mirrored sound emitters moved around the tank cabin. This was a relatively simple fix to allow correct 3D sound without going deeper into the sound system.
Learnings
Simple things that are typically managed by the game engine can be tricky if the case is special enough. When fixing those problems, reach for the simple solutions first!
Another learning: Multiplayer is hard!!! It took way more time to sync the scenes than anyone expected. Testing was the most time-consuming part, especially with VR.
On the positive side, VR development was so much fun! Especially when we had a bug that produced countless cannon shells in the tank, it felt like those ball pits for children.