Phantom Tank: Pac Man on Crack

classic arcade style

The second classic Atari game I recreated in Flash. You control a tank that has to do battle with an army of ghost tanks, all seeking to destroy your base. The game has a similar engine to that of Pac Man but it packs a little bit more heat.

I wanted to build a tile game for some time, a game that could expose all the possible challenges one might encounter with this method, and which I could use to demonstrate the various techniques involved in making a tile game (other tutorials seem to focus on the very simple sort.)

All Atari 2600 games as far as I could see were tiled, but of all the ones I've built, only this was brought on to Flash with the tile logic. Mainly because the Atari engine could manage 8x8, 4x4 and even 2x2 tile systems with ease. Something its unfortunate flashy cousin can't handle with the same ease. On the other hand the ready made sprites one can build in Flash make building game engines a very uncomplicated process.

The game has three basic level layouts, and it loops through them getting more difficult with each iteration. The level layouts data is stored inside an XML file and the tiles are built based on this data, through pixel copying, so that what you end up with at the beginning of each level is a big bitmap image for the maze. Collision is run almost entirely through the same XML data, just as it's done in normal tile games.

The ai logic offered an interesting challenge as the enemy tanks needed to behave distinctly enough from each other so as not to create a number of dumb, mindless tanks that moved and behaved as if following the same directions. I hope to post the tutorial for this soon.