CS201 Project: Tank War

Dec 2021 Edit: I stopped running the server because of the log4shell exploit that affects most Java applications.

Last semester for CS201 at USC, my group wrote up a game project for class. Not exactly the most innovative or beautifully designed game ever, but the gameplay is pretty fun when it doesn’t lag.

Here’s a link to the executable JAR file: link removed since server is no longer running

Note that this only runs on Java 8. They took out some libraries in later versions of Java that broke the client-server communication.

Demo

Gameplay

First you register a name and put in a password, but make sure you have at least one number and one uppercase letter. Only players with accounts can create rooms.

Then you either create a room or join a room. Each player picks a color, checks the ready button, and the room creator starts the game.

Basically you control a tank (arrow keys) and shoot other guys (space). Pretty typical stuff, but bullets bounce off surfaces for a few times, which makes the game much more chaotic.

Development

My team has five people, including the following:

Yifan Meng

Anne Yu

Erdong Hu

Hexi Xiao

…and Me

We spent at least 2 weeks on this project, with at least one all-nighter. Ended up with a monster with like 6k lines of Java code.

The game server runs on the EC2 machine that powers this website, and is the lowest tier so please tolerate the lag. I’ll probably keep the server running until my credit card runs out of money.