0.2.17 To my kids 7 October, 04:49
The logo, twelve new skins and a fairer Bruiser
For the logo, OpenAI's Codex drew eight options in different styles. I picked the comic burst with three tanks. Codex cut it out for the main menu and drew the sky-blue game icon from it.
I also wanted tanks with faces and themes, and the two tank models were never made to be repainted. The agent first worked out how their textures sit on them, then wrote a tool that paints them: it colours each part of a tank by where it is and projects flat pictures onto it from the front, the top and the sides. Codex drew the pictures, from a shark's teeth to a pirate's skull. Fourteen skins came out of it. I dropped two, sent two back for changes, and gave some of them wheels to match.
The balance came overnight. My kids could not win with the Scout against the Bruiser. In the town's tight streets the Scout had no room to use its speed, and in the chaos not every shell hits, so the Bruiser's slow reload hardly mattered. It also had more health and hit harder. I said it could keep any two of those three. To choose, the agent ran bot-against-bot matches, fired at a human pace, until they gave the same result my kids had, then tried the options. The Bruiser kept its heavy shells and slow reload and lost its extra health.
In this build
- The Tanks Mate 2 logo on the main menu, and the game icon.
- Twelve new skins, Great White, Timber Wolf, Tiger Stripes, Bumblebee, Jolly Roger, Hot Rod, Galaxy, Sundae, Ribbit, Pepperoni Pizza, Robot and Penguin, for 26 in all.
- Matching wheels on ten of the skins.
- The lobby shows the other players' tanks on pedestals again.
- The Bruiser has the Scout's health, 100.
- Bots see less, notice you later, forget you and miss more. Easy and Normal bots aim where you were a moment ago.
- The mouse wheel zooms the view, and the middle button turns the sniper view on and off.
