Tanks: The Life and Death Collection

The tanks are determined to end each others' lives - no matter what.

Tanks: The Life and Death Collection is a collection of three iterations of Unity's TANKS! tutorial game, created and packaged together as the final assignment for Pippin Barr's Game Studio I course at Concordia University. The first game, War Projections, was designed to subvert the base tank game's use of light and its camera, the second, Sing-Along Shells, its use of sound, and the third, Miracle of Life, its 3D models.

All of the games included in the collection are two-player multiplayer games in which players control multicolored tanks capable of limited movement and firing shells. The first tank's movements are assigned to the WASD keys and its fire functionality to the spacebar, while the second tank is controlled with the arrow keys and the enter key.

War Projections

In War Projections, players battle one another in an arena cloaked in darkness. In order to see the environment around them, you must fire your shells, which instantiate special screens that project the world in front of them as it would appear if it were completely lit. In addition to helping you decipher your surroundings, shooting at these screens makes shells fire out of them in the direction they are facing, providing a tactical advantage as well. But watch out - your screens will explode if shot at by the other player, so be careful you don't find yourself boxed in by your own projections.

Sing-Along Shells

In Sing-Along Shells, players alternate between controlling the game's background music - Fortunate Son, by Creedence Clearwater Revival - by moving their tanks backward and forward. If the player currently in control of Fortunate Son progresses to the point in it where the lyrics currently being sung match the lyrics currently on-screen, they can shoot a shell, and control switches to the other player. As a bonus, shells spawn lethal orbs of fire that pulse to the beat of the song, instantly destroy whatever they touch, and remain on the field until either player is killed - making rounds increasingly perilous the longer they last.

Miracle of Life

In Miracle of Life, tanks age overtime; beginning life at age 1, reaching sexual maturity at age 21, and dying at age 100, all rusted and slow. Upon becoming sexually mature, you can shoot out an egg that will hatch into a new, baby tank, allowing its lineage to continue on beyond the death of its parent. However, its immediate parent will continue to fire at the opposing tank for as long as it remains on the battlefield, protecting its child with all its strength. And, each new tank will contain slight physical and audio differences that set it apart from its parent, resulting in each tank looking vastly different from its ancestors after several generations of births. All the while this is happening, the sun rises and sets, and the sands of the desert on which the tanks fight slowly rises, gradually swallowing up everything around them. Only the trees remain, which will continuously seed new trees overtime, as old ones wither and die.

For further information, the project's official press kit can be accessed here.

For insight into the development of each game included in the collection, my process journal for my Game Studio I course can be accessed here.

Finally, for those interested in learning about the man, the myth, the legend behind these games, you can view the portfolio of yours truly, Alexander Kozina, here.