That time we made a cool strategic game for iOS: The Final Tank Down

I was a young junior developer at the time and I was like “We should make this, this, this and that”.

The amazing part is that my bosses of the time, Matteo Manganelli and Andrea De Ieso, heads of http://mutabilis.it/ , listened to me.

So, we came out with a bunch on pitches and one of them took shape and was quickly released.
That’s how The Final Tank Down was born.
It was the very first wave of iOS games and the market was growing by the minute.

The idea was to present a puzzle/strategic game with frenetic vibes.
The goal was accomplished.

The Final Tank Down gameplay was about tanks moving and shooting in a board where the slots fall down after a few seconds if the tank is on them.
So, every tank’s duty is to shot the slots in order to make the opponents eventually fall.

We released the game for iPad and iPhone and it was also presenting a local multiplayer mode.

The game also appeared later in my novel Katalepsis.
The main characters used to play a modified version of The Final Tank Down called Drop-All.

Here’s the description of that game coming from my book:

Drop-All is a board game consisting of a checkered surface with a number of different boxes depending on the type of match and a number of pawns per player in the shape of a catapult, also varying in quantity: the game being played by Neil and Thomas has a 100-box playground and four catapults per head, the white ones on the Neil side and the black ones on the side of Dr. Welder.

The game takes place in turns. In his own turn, the player can decide whether to move one of the catapults of a box in any direction, or decide whether to shoot on any cell in the field, destroying it, anywhere except the ones already taken by the pawns. The player who manages to put all the opposing pawns, each in a single box without the possibility of movement, wins the game.

Tech notes: the game was made by a 3 person team in slightly more than a month using Ogre3D.
Link to our post in the Ogre3D forum: https://forums.ogre3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=62841

I would still love to re-vamp this game eventually but in the Drop-All turn based version.
Never say never…