Tank Squad is a game I have been looking forward to and talked about on this site before. Recently they released a demo on Steam in part of Steam Next Fest, and with eagerness I downloaded the demo. Well, the game is in a very early stage, and while it shows potential, it’s far from what I expected. On videos and dev-logs, it looked so much more polished. The visuals are pretty poor, the AI seems to be dumb as bricks, but at least the physics seems to be there, somewhat. So, what happened here? One explanation for this is probably what I stumbled upon over on the Steam forum.
The developer [DeGenerals]Trebor says:
Thanks for the feedback, unfortunately we dont have time for that nor we will have the budget to keep developing the game for 2 more years without releasing what we have.
I’ve worked 3 days now on tree issue and managed to unblock it today, tomorrow we will upload build with trees being breakable.
I will just paste here an answer from another topic why are we here:
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And we will polish and enhance what we are doing. After the project was being developed for 2 years we started seeing that the project is actually in place, it is not progressing. I’ve made then the decision to start working on this project full time and leave Tank Mechanic Sim for overhours, just to finish DLC2 for TMS. SInce then few other very experienced team members had also joined this project and we’re now here, year later.
This is indeed tech demo, showcasing our approach to tank controls, battle gameplay and repair section gameplay. It is unpolish and not finished at all and even in half year or full year this wont be called 1.0 version.
We’ve fallen into financial problems and had to just let people find other jobs as we were and still are on a minus budget. At some point the project was developed by 20 people, now it is done by 6. This will also change due to budget limits and finally, up to the release there will be 4 people, including me.
I would like to wait with the demo and full release when the game is almost finished but we cannot do it. We wanted to check if the game is something anyone wants to play and thats exactly what we’re getting now – criticism, positive and negative feedback.
The game must be released at some point next year just to get the funds and let us bring back few old developers, especially programmers and artists to just allow faster expansion and other gameplay features and content. Now this is impossible and this is the state of the build.
I am very sorry to disappoint you for failed impression, I would like things to be different.
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Here we are, and your feedback is second that is advising to postpone the development while we just can’t. This really builds up the optimism in me
Oh boy, this isn’t good at all. It seems they will be in a hurry to recoup some of the costs, and then build up the game. I fear if it’s released in this state it won’t stand much of a chance. However, I did notice that they are without a publisher, so I recommended they seek out either Hooded Horse or Slitherine as they seem to publish just these kinds of indie games. The devs probably know all this already though. Even so, I hope they manage to crawl up from this hole of doom. It would be a real shame if this Tank simulator burned out like a Panzer IV on the Russian steps before it had a chance to prove itself.
/Thomas
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