I still remember the day when I first `clapped eyes on` a little shareware game on the Amiga called Scorched Tanks. I was over at a friend’s house and he had recently downloaded the demo version to his Amiga. I hadn’t really seen this kind of a game before, other than Gorilla on the IBM Pc which was much more primitive. And I loved it. I think I loved it mainly because it focussed on manipulating an earthly landscape, and being the kind of down-to-earth fellow that I am, it was right up my alley.
That was the start of a long-lasting fondness for what typically are thought of as `artillery games`. Later in my Amiga years I created a graphics library for Blitz Basic called Mildred, which replaced it’s hardware-blitter-based rendering with the CPU and `fast ram`. The main drive behind its creation was to put together the functionality I would need to create my own Scorched Tanks type of game. Although other people eventually got more out of the library than I did, I did start to put a game together, but didn’t get much further than a fast scroll system for a large landscape. That was probably 10-15 years ago.
Having ditched the Amiga to immigrate to the USA in 2000, this style of game has still held a soft spot in my memory and an excited spot in my ideas about the future. Sometimes I pick up this concept again and steer my development towards its eventuality, and then sometimes I drop it again. But right now I am in a `pick it up` phase again. So for right now that means I’m working on a deformable landscape game.
It may or may not end up being a turn-based game. It might be more of a realtime action game more along the lines of a platform game, with some fun characters and live network play. We’ll see how that goes. Right now I am scheming and plotting the ideal way to handle really big landscapes with full pixel precision. That means every single pixel in the entire pervasive game world needs to act as though it has consistent ongoing physics all the time. The cpu power to do that is just not there even on a high end desktop computer. So this calls for a lot of optimizations and techniques to accomplish the magic without the expense.
Who knows where this will lead, but for now it’s reigniting the passion. And it doesn’t hurt to play a few games of Atomic Tanks, Pocket Tanks along the way – or maybe to pull out the old Amiga emulator for a few games of those classics: Worms and Scorched Tanks 
Pardon me!