Posted on September 30, 2009 - by Eric

Ftanks and Pushbutton Engine

Our next big release is codenamed Ftanks. Its a ‘refinement’ of the classic Worms formula featuring tanks (or Scorched Earth for the older readers) . It is funded by come2play to showcase their very groovy API. It is also being built with the Pushbutton Engine. PBE is a game engine for the Flash platform which by itself is great enough. But what made us jump into using it is the fact that its open-source, comes with a marketplace to buy/sell components and is made by Torque alumni. We knew it was gonna be much tougher than building our custom engine but we figured it will be good for us in the long run.

True enough, PBE has proven to be tougher than we thought and we encountered some thorny problems related to fitting what we needed into the engine. But we persisted and are steadily going forward with the game. Huge props goes to PBE’s Ben Garney for the patience to walk us through solutions. Also worth mentioning are the cool coders from the small but growing community namely Phil Peron, Martijn Segers, and others.

Pushbutton engine is in (REAL) beta so a few rough spots exists. Its NOT as3-beginner friendly in its current state but hopefully they can push the bar further down when 1.0 comes around. My partner, Shiki, is liking it and even posted several tutorials to help early adopters. As for Ftanks, the tanks are moving and animated, rockets are firing (but not exploding) and stuff is coming along shortly. Look for a public beta in late October- early November. Here is a tasty screenshot for reading this post.