Author: Ozhan Sen

Know Your Aspects

/ Ozhan Sen / 3 Comments

And now for something completely different.

In these post release days where we are finally receiving some much appreciated feedback from the players, I would like to talk to you regarding something that we’ve received questions about and noticed on some of YouTube videos and screenshots of the game.

The Aspect Ratio

War of the Human Tanks uses a 4:3 aspect ratio, which means it is not widescreen (16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio). In order to play it or any other games you have that use a 4:3 aspect ratio without getting horribly stretched in Full Screen Mode, you need to enable a simple setting in your graphic card’s options. Why this setting is turned off by default ever remains a mystery.

But first let’s look at what I’m talking about. First screenshot is how our game is supposed to look and second is how it turns out without enabling the correct setting.

WotHT Screenshot with correct 4:3 aspect ratio

WotHT Screenshot with correct 4:3 aspect ratio

WotHT Screenshot with wrong stretched result

WotHT Screenshot with incorrect aspect ratio

Enabling a simple option will save you from suffering this horrible stretching. I have an NVIDIA card, so I’ll describe how to do this for NVIDIA cards. If you have something else, the process should be mostly similar.

First, right click on an empty space on your desktop and choose NVIDIA Control Panel to open the settings window. You can alternatively open this window by typing NVIDIA on the Search Bar after pressing the Windows key. With current drivers it will look like this:

NVIDIA settings for aspect ratio

NVIDIA settings for aspect ratio

On this window, navigate to the shown tab. Display > Adjust desktop size and position > Scaling.

If you see that “Full-screen” is checked like this: then you are going to see all games that are not wide-screen stretched, apart from a few that compensate against that problem.

What you need to do to fix this is to pick the choice above it, “Aspect ratio”. Also do not forget to set Perform scaling on: GPU. Other settings on this screen don’t matter.

When you follow these instructions, there will be no change to your widescreen applications. Non-widescreen applications, however, will now display in their correct proportions.

Incoming!

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With the release of War of the Human Tanks so close by, I can’t help posting again. Lets start with the new artwork from Angie (@9aia), presenting Choko from War of the Human Tanks.

Choko is always full of energy!

Since we’ve been getting some questions about what we will be selling and where, here’s a recap of our release schedule on 14th.

War of the Human Tanks, the game itself, will be sold for $9.99. Sound of the Human Tanks I, the first soundtrack compilation, will be sold for $3.99. And War of the Human Tanks Deluxe, containing both the game and soundtrack, will be sold for $11.99.

Of course, we are selling the Deluxe bundle for $9.99 for as long as the pre-orders last.

War of the Human Tanks and War of the Human Tanks Deluxe will be available from Desura. War of the Human Tanks, Sound of the Human Tanks I and War of the Human Tanks Deluxe will be available from Gamersgate. War of the Human Tanks will also be available from Indievania, and Sound of the Human Tanks I will be available separately from Bandcamp.

Green Man Gaming will feature War of the Human Tanks soon after.

And with your support on Steam Greenlight, War of the Human Tanks, Sound of the Human Tanks I and War of the Human Tanks Deluxe will be available on Steam one day as well.

Note: The prices may vary slightly depending on your region.

Sortie Order

/ Ozhan Sen / 1 Comment


We are proud to announce that the day is at hand, War of the Human Tanks is being released 14 September 2012! Initially it will be available from Desura, Gamersgate and Indievania for $9.99 (or equivalent).

A demo fully featuring the first five chapters will be available 4 September 2012. You will be able to carry over your saves from the demo to the full game. So don’t hold yourself back, play it a couple of times, experiment with different results in battles, gather some supplies, develop and build different units and modules…

To celebrate this wondrous occasion Indieviddy prepared the new trailer you saw on top of this post, hope you like it.

Desura Digital Distribution

WotHT Bonus Maps

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With the game’s release date approaching, we’ve had some more free time in our hands (controversial yes, I know). Naturally, we’ve put it to good use.
Following a good tradition, we at Fruitbat Factory wanted to add something unique to our English release of War of the Human Tanks. After deliberation we ended up adding two bonus battle maps because designing them is so addictive that we couldn’t stop at just one.

With the addition of these two maps War of the Human Tanks now has more than thirty maps! (Well, thirty one to be exact, but you didn’t hear this from me.)

Clearing a route in WotHT unlocks extra Free Battles in addition to the storyline maps you have cleared. These maps tend to be considerably more spicy then the normal maps, and are intended for the players looking for a bigger challenge. They are completely optional of course. The two new maps will appear alongside these bonus maps as you clear one of the game’s several endings and let you put your survival skills to test for the coming Fruitbat Apocalypse. They are not intended as the most difficult maps in the game, but should be quite different from the previous ones and present the player with new sort of strategic dilemmas.

Happy hunting!

We prepared a bunch of screenshots to help you assess the… wait, what, one got out?!
Stop it before…!

War Report #1

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The scenario translation for War of the Human Tanks is proceeding at a great speed ever since we concluded our work on the game’s rather extensive battle logic. 7 of the game’s 13 chapters have now passed through editing. While initially preparing the hand drawn maps was being delayed by the script translation since we wanted them to reflect the battlefields as accurately as possible, the maps have now trouble keeping up. This doesn’t affect our release schedule, since there are a lot of other steps to go through even after translation is complete.

We wouldn’t want anyone to get bored while waiting, so we opened up three more sections of the War of the Humans homepage and updated the screenshot gallery. By browsing the System Tab and its sub pages you can learn about many aspects of our game and how to play it. These pages double as the game’s online manual. Have fun checking them out.

As a special thanks for the thousands of people who watched our first teaser trailer this week, here is a clear sketch from one of the scenes in War of the Human Tanks:

Hand drawn maps

/ Ozhan Sen / 1 Comment

While showcasing War of the Human Tanks to our friends in the early stages of the project, a common and more or less universal feedback we got was that the battle backgrounds (which you can see in various screenshots we have online at the moment) look too abstract. My friend Serkan Sanver who works as a game designer, made a specific suggestion to make the backgrounds display the terrain shape instead to make them more approachable.


I discussed this idea with the team, and we all shared the same general opinion that having maps in the background would be a good improvement. What this could mean in practice was a matter for more debate and dozens of experiments in different styles. When we brought the option up with Yakiniku Banzai, the original developers, they gave the change the green light. The funny thing is, it turns out they already had the same idea and had employed a similar feature in their latest title, Recycle Princess, which is still in production.

Eventually we decided to follow the same general style Yakiniku Banzai had turned to, albeit with a somewhat more modern touch since Recycle Princess is set in a fantasy setting.

I asked Yulay Devlet, a talented art designer friend of mine who also designed our cute logo, to take on the task and he accepted the challenge. After bouncing a lot of drafts we were able to reach a consensus on the style and details, and a complete version of our first map was created. Here you can see it being used in the first battle of the game, Ookawahara Battery Recapture.

Fruitbat Factory Forum

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Our forum is ready. Please feel free to use it to talk about our games, company, your suggestions or anything else you would like to share with us and everyone else hanging out there.

In addition, three new sections were opened on the War of the Human Tanks homepage. Two more links under the System tab now function: you can get some info about the game’s menus from the System Screen page, and Screen Shots page will host a growing selection of War of the Human Tanks screenshots.

Our Downloads tab got a new section called Avatars where you can find forum avatars of the War of the Human Tanks characters. These avatars are sized for our forum but feel free to use them where you wish.

Here is a special treat for you to celebrate this occasion, a full campaign map of War of the Human Tanks. You won’t find it anywhere else, at least for now.