Tanks, Assemble!

Welcome to Tanks Assemble - the top-down RTS where armchair general meets armchair designer!

Choose from a variety of engines, hulls, and turrets to customize your army to your heart's content. Control all buildings on the map to win!

Controls

WASD or Arrow Keys - move camera

Mouse Wheel - zoom in/out

Left-Click Drag - select units

Right Click - command selected units to move

Q - toggle show/hide build menus

E - open/close settings

R - restart level

The Tank Building Manual

Tank cost differing amounts of money and time to build (build time is proportional to the square root of cost). Each of the three parts that you select for your tank affect its performance in various ways:

Engine - bigger engines increase the speed of the tank.

Hull - bigger hulls increase the health of the tank. However, bigger hulls are also slower.

Weapon - there are two types of weapons: artillery weapons (mortar and howitzer) that can shoot over walls, and direct fire weapons (everything else) that cannot. Each weapon has its own strengths and weaknesses, so try them all to find the one that best suits your needs!

Some Tips if You're Struggling

If you find that your tanks are being wiped out too quickly, try playing a little more aggressively and capturing as many factories as you can at the start. There's a few seconds of grace period at the beginning where the enemy won't make any tanks, so you can use this opportunity to capture as many enemy factories as you can. Capturing one or two factories in the early game makes a big difference, because it means that you won't have to deal with enemy tanks from that factory for the rest of the level.

You can also try playing defensively and hopping from factory to factory. The healing power that comes from a friendly factory can be a significant boon to your army. Don't worry too much about losing too many fountains in the early game, because the AI doesn't really know how to use them. It'll just keep trying to throw tanks at you without bothering to save up for charges or anything, so as long as you can destroy the enemy tanks as they come, losing fountains isn't really gonna set you up for failure in the long run.

Worst case scenario, you can also skip a level. The levels are meant to be played in order because they're supposed to be in order of ascending difficulty, but all the levels are unlocked, so if you find that one of the levels is too hard, you will not be penalized for moving on.

Credits

Sprites made in Inkscape

Victory jingle sampled from Daft Punk's "Beyond"

Defeat jingle sampled from The Sherbs's "We Ride Tonight"

All other music and sound effects made in LMMS

Special thanks to Thanks Tanks - an obscure Flash game and the original inspiration for the engine-hull-weapon system. It's always been a dream of mine to see that mechanic in 2d, so when I saw the theme for this jam, I knew I had to make this game.

Functionality-wise, the web build is identical to the Windows and Linux versions. However, in my experience, it's laggier, so if it's too laggy for your liking, you can try downloading the native versions.

Once again, as with most of my other jams, there were quite a few features that didn't make it in because of time constraints (a handful of minor bugs were also left in for the same reason). However, in the end, I still ended up with something I'm proud of. Enjoy!