This article was originally posted on the Digitanks website
For this week's article I’ve decided to give you guys a behind-the-scenes look at how the visual design for our CPU structure was decided on. I think I’m going to make this into a series because it interests me a great deal, it’s one of my favorite parts of game development. It’s one thing to let an artist loose on one of your assets and say, “Make it look good!” but with a little bit of forethought and design, a game’s art pieces can be not only pretty but also contribute to the game in meaningful ways. So I’m sharing our design process in the hopes of helping others in their own game development exploits. (Also: if you want to get wasted tonight, it may be a fun drinking game to take a shot every time you see the term “CPU” in this article.)
If you remember from the tank design article, the first thing I always do is establish my goals and constraints. It’s a classic problem solving technique, when approaching a problem where the solution requires divergent thinking, I always start out by figuring out where I don’t want to go.
It’s the largest structure, it needs to interact properly with the terrain even if that terrain is steep in grade.It’s the center of the player’s base, and the essential thing to protect, the design needs to look imposing or important.It needs to remind any computer-proficient person of a CPU.In the case of the CPU we face a number of problems. Digitanks is a strategy game and the CPU is used to construct other structures. It also acts as the source of the player’s “network” and all of the player’s energy expands from it. The goal of the game is to destroy the enemy CPUs, so they need to look like something worth destroying. That means they need to be large, and with largeness comes problems interacting with the terrain. The terrain in Digitanks is dynamically generated and can be rather steep, so large structures need to be able to rest on this terrain and still look natural. And of course, it needs to be reminiscent of a real-world CPU. Anybody who’s opened up the inside of a computer and looked at the mysterious gizmos and gadgets within should say, “That’s a CPU!” when they look at our design. Not all of the structures in Digitanks follow the computer-hardware model, but for the ones that do we wanted them to be obvious enough to the typical gamer who doesn’t necessarily hold a computer engineering degree.
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