Why a game on messenger ?
When we came up with the idea of Tankaar, only thing we were certain about was that "its going to be an artillery game". Though numerous artillery games are available today but we wanted Tankaar to be different. We wanted it to be on a platform where one can play it with friends without hassle. This gave rise to a thought process which kept us occupied for few weeks.
Artillery games have a long history. These were among the first games developed for computers. This category of games generally involves two players involved in a combat. The combat weapons are bombs and missiles which are fired by tanks, fighter planes etc, with each player taking control of his or her combat vehicle. The games are usually turn based. The trajectory, power and characteristic of fired artillery makes them a great strategy game.
The most popular games in this category include Worms, Scorched Tanks, Pocket Tanks, Gorillas, Scorched Earth. Obviously the list is long and is not limited to these names only. Even after being so long in fashion the charm of artillery games has still not faded. The huge success of artillery games on IPhone definitely means that artillery games can still capture the attention of a casual game player.
Most of the artillery games were designed for two players. In the absence of two players, an option of player Vs computer is generally provided in these games. Since owing to the exponential increase in the number of personal computers it is hardly expected for two players to be on a single computer, so many of them were developed as LAN games. But still in this world which is well connected through internet LAN also seems like a small territory.
The thrill of playing a good artillery combat game with your friend, who is sitting in another country or another continent, cannot be described in words. But unlike other online games available today on social networking sites like Farmville, Mafia Wars which do not require players to be online at the same time, artillery games require coincident participation of players. Owing to this reason these games cannot be added into the category of contemporary social networking multiplayer games.
So what can possibly be the best platform for these one-to-one games? The best platform can be a service which is used in real time and which provides simultaneous interaction between two persons sitting far away. Obviously this brings us to the most popular and quite old interaction platform i.e. instant messaging. Advocating instant messaging for playing artillery games does not mean these games cannot be hosted on server and played with people currently logged in. But instant messaging service which failed to make a big mark in gaming industry (unlike social networking services) can certainly turn out to be great platform for artillery games and other one-to-one games. The success of chesspark.com has proved that one to one games on messaging platform have a huge potential. If these combat games get a platform similar to what chess got in chesspark.com, both messaging and artillery games will benefit from this union. So we decided to integrate Tankaar with XMPP messaging.