TankZ!

First things first: Get some graphics

Manuel Rauber

Jun 15, 2015 • 2 min read

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series [TankZ - A game made to learn Unity](https://manuel-rauber.com/series/tankz-a-game-made-to-learn-unity/ "TankZ - A game made to learn Unity")

After getting used to the Unity editor, I started developing TankZ by getting some graphics first. Developing a game without any graphics doesn’t make sense. My artistic skills with Photoshop or other tools are rudimentary available. At least, I can draw a stick figure… Doing the graphics by myself is just not possible. Luckily I’ve watched some videos of [Tom Wendel](http://www.tomwendel.net/)‘s [MoonTaxi Remake](https://tomwendelblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/moontaxi-remake/) where he showed a beautifully designed graphic pack from [Kenney](http://www.kenney.nl/assets). After falling in love with his work I decided to buy them, too. $9.00 for more than 16,000 absolutely stunning game assets is more than fair. Good thing: The complete pack has assets for TankZ and later for the Tower Defence. Two birds, one stone. Perfect!

Importing the assets into Unity is super easy: Just drag them and drop ’em into Unity. It took me about two minutes to build a very little and simplistic tank like this one:

The first TankZ tank. Cool, eh? ;-)

Player Tank GameObjects

This is done by stacking some GameObjects with two textures. It’s stacked this way (as shown in the screenshot on the left), so we can manipulate them better later, when the barrel will follow the mouse. How this is done, will be explained in the next blog post.

Components “tankBeige_outline”

The “tankBeige_outline” (oh yes, I just was way to lazy to rename the original asset…) is made of a Sprite Renderer with default values and a Box Collider 2D, so we have easy collision detection later on. The same settings are used for the barrel, expect it’s missing a Box Collider 2D. I don’t feel it’s necessary that the barrel can collide with other things. The base of the tank should be fine for that.

GameObjects “PlayerTank”

At last, the GameObject “PlayerTank” got a RigidBody 2D attached. It is used for moving the tank later with the WSAD keys. Please note, that I’ve modified the values for Mass, Linear Drag and Angular Drag. It’ll lead to a bit more realistic movement of the tank.

The next blog post will explain, how the barrel will follow the mouse and the tank is moved. Stay tuned!

In the meantime: Don’t forget to take a look at the current source code at GitHub and the example deployment.

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