We are excited to share our first trailer of War of the Human Tanks, the first game soon to be released under the Fruitbat Factory label. We hope you’ll like it and share the fun with your friends!
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The pixel barrier
There’s been so much miscellaneous work to go around that I haven’t had a chance to do much for the… you know, game part of Human Tanks since my last pass over the current translation a few days back. Ran into some obstacles in translating the game setting menus which meant a lot of work down the drain, and after dealing with that I discovered something new to fix:
The game videos.
“Ozhan, these videos look kind of pixelated, is it just at my end?”
It wasn’t.
What puzzled me was that I had watched the game opening on YouTube several times, and it looked much better there. Looking more closely at the game’s movie archives, I discovered that the movies in fact look perfect when run in an external player. The game was doing something bad to them.
The cause soon made itself obvious: the movies were encoded in 640×480 resolution, while the game itself runs in a 800×600 window. Apparently the engine did a poor job of up-scaling them.
Another day later, I have re-encoded the game videos in 800×600 resolution and you’d be hard pressed to notice a quality drop (when comparing to the original videos run in a player), and they look much better in-game. Banzai!
Don’t take my word for it, you can check out the difference in this comparison instead:
When we discussed this with Yakiniku Banzai, they explained that at the time of making the first game they were very concerned about the size of the game movies as they knew there were going to be a lot of them. We feel that this is no longer something that warrants much notice (and actually the new videos ended up only about 20% bigger than original). Their encoding options were also limited due to the oldish software used to make the videos, and this is just how things ended up. We’re all happy about the chance to improve this aspect of the game.
Hand drawn maps
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
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.
Home of the Human Tanks
War of the Human Tanks pages are now live!
You can hop straight in by clicking on the banner, or navigate there from our main page at www.fruitbatfactory.com through the same banner.
We are adding more sections when other tasks allow. Currently you can read up on the story and characters, and get an overview of the game system.
Once completed, the pages will double as a manual for the game with in-depth game play guides.
If you spot some issues with the site, don’t hesitate to tell us.
A work in progress
When you first start up War of the Human Tanks fully in Japanese, the sight can be a bit overwhelming from a translation point of view. I’m referring to this:
It doesn’t exactly help the task that the gameplay script is split into perhaps a few hundred separate scripts, and the strings that need translating (perhaps as long as 1 character in size!) are hidden among the other game logic.
Well, our resident helper and tech genius Tony Blomqvist wrote some marvelous filters to help us deal with this issue. I’ve been chipping away at them from various angles for a while now with Yoshifumi‘s support, and the gameplay is… getting there. There are still a few bigger scripts to tackle (including unit infos, which are reflected pretty much everywhere), but it’s getting easier and easier to figure out what goes on in the game in English.
Of course, the initial translation is just half the story. After inserting the changes you go fiddle with the menus to figure out exactly where that one word was supposed to appear in and just how badly you screwed it up. Then tune and tinker.
But as you can see here, progress is definitely being made, and it’s quite fun to see the screens one by one turn into something understandable:
(Note that the images shown in the screenshots are also a work-in-progress.)
Human Tanks English logo
Above is the original Japanese logo for War of the Human Tanks. As you can see the ‘series’ name is emphasized heavily in the proportions.
I prepared many alternative versions and our team picked their favorite from amongst those. That one went over many, many changes over the course of several days, and finally came out as the version you can see below.
I hope you like the design as much as we do.
This is naturally just one handpicked detail I wanted to share with everyone. This particular image is important because you will be seeing it everywhere.
The progress overall has been rapid with each team member exploring different aspects of the game. Stay tuned!
War of the Human Tanks
Yoshifumi had a meeting with Yakiniku Banzai in Nagoya, and our first license was signed.
War of the Human Tanks will be the first game Fruitbat Factory will be releasing worldwide in the English language. It is a story-driven strategy game with a setting deliciously crafted with black humor.
The game’s been our staff’s top pick for release since the moment we laid our eyes on it. It is also the first part of the Human Tanks game trilogy, which we hope to bring over in its entirety if the reception is favorable.
Yakiniku Banzai are cool guys and we couldn’t be happier about this opportunity to work with them! Expect more news in the near future.
(There was yakiniku consumed during the meeting again. Photos courtesy of Yakiniku Banzai.)
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