Newsletter #1
Welcome to the BlockTanks Newsletter! This website/newsletter will act as a “changelog” so you can stay in-the-loop on everything about BlockTanks. As BlockTanks developers, we agreed that having a centralized source of information would be greatly beneficial to the game.
Where Have We Been?
You might be reading this in your email inbox, from a social media post, or from BlockTanks itself. It may have been a while since you heard the name BlockTanks, or you may play it everyday. For the past few years, we have mostly used our Discord server to interact with the BlockTanks community, but we would like to branch out more because we know many of our players do not even use Discord!
For the past year, we worked on a different game that we released on September 18th. However, that game did not do well enough to justify keeping it. So, after a lot of time and consideration, we decided to come back to BlockTanks with an intentional effort to grow the game and boost the current community!
Wait… Who is “we?”
BlockTanks is owned and operated by Karate Fox Studios, LLC. I (Kevin) own this company, and I help coordinate the projects we work on. For the foreseeable future, our one-and-only project is going to be BlockTanks, meaning everyone at the company will be contributing to the game. Right now, our team includes:
- Myself (CEO/Manager)
- A few programmers
- A community manager
Additionally, it’s important to realize all of us are students, meaning the rate at which updates are published will reflect that!
We also have many volunteers that help keep BlockTanks running, including:
- Chat moderators
- Artists
- Event coordinators
Our “Blind-Spots”
One of the first things we did when coming back to BlockTanks was create a list of “blind-spots,” or weaknesses that prevent the game from growing:
- Design: issues that relate to the structure or gameplay of BlockTanks.
- Bots in BlockTanks basically give free XP to players because they are really easy to kill.
- There are too many matches at any given time, spreading out players across matches.
- The community calendar is rarely used.
- There is no framework of adding new abilities or mechanics to BlockTanks: we feel like we have too many “weapons” and we have no system for adding non-weapon “abilities” or power-ups.
- Technical: issues that relate to the code of the game.
- The code is very old (dating back to 2016) and hard to read.
- Some visual hacks are possible, such as adding tracers or removing roofs.
- There are frequent bugs with the UI.
- Previous bad coding structures/practices make it difficult to update the game quickly.
- Community: issues with engaging with the BlockTanks community.
- We don’t communicate our updates well.
- As previously mentioned, Discord is used a little too much.
- We do not have a public record of game updates.
Our Roadmap
In all honesty, taking time away from BlockTanks has helped me to better understand where the game’s limitations are, and so I really do look forward to improving the game with that new knowledge.
In no particular order, here are some of the ways we plan to address the current problems with BlockTanks.
- Refactoring Code: We will invest a lot of time in improving the code behind BlockTanks. Although this is mostly “behind-the-scenes,” this will fix many bugs and allow us to add features faster in the future.
- Visual Improvements: Working on our new game taught us a lot about optimizing graphics, and we have expanded our ability to create good graphics. In BlockTanks, we will be adding:
- Tank treads
- Bullet trails
- Smoother gameplay
- Bot Changes: We will lower the XP given by bot kills to a very negligible amount to eliminate bot “farming.” Furthermore, we will only take non-bot kills into account when displaying player K/D ratios.
- Match Optimization: Game modes will rotate each day so there are fewer matches per region, creating higher player counts per match.
- Team Balancing: Keeping teams fair is a big priority for us.
- Community Calendar: Will no longer be restricted to VIP members.
- Social Media: BlockTanks will be active on more platforms outside of Discord to attract new players.
- Translations: The text on BlockTanks will be translated into multiple languages so more players across the world can access the game.
- Official Events: We will start livestreaming official BlockTanks events to drive activity and attention to the website.
We hope you enjoyed this post, and we would love to hear your thoughts!
Sincerely,
Kevin Champagne
Karate Fox Studios, CEO
BlockTanks Newsletter 
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