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Developer Alpha Channel on TankHead’s mix of vehicular carnage, scavenging, and surviving
S
Shaan Joshi
There’s another good reason for the roguelike boom: The genre gives smaller teams and newly formed studios a chance to make the game of their dreams without compromising on variety and replayability.
Such is the tale of Alpha Channel, a Toronto-based team of veteran developers founded by Branislav “Bane” Grujic and Daniel Ebanks, whose decades in the AAA space includes working on some of gaming’s biggest franchises, from Far Cry and Splinter Cell to Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. After notching such professional success, with Grujic and Ebanks serving as lead programmer and art director on multiple projects, the pair decided to go out on their own and started Alpha Channel with “a couple of clear goals” in mind.
“[The studio was founded] to make games we’d love to play and to create experiences that feel fresh and hard to categorize,” explains Grujic. “Between the two of us, we have over 40 years of experience in the AAA industry. While that experience has been invaluable, it also inspired us to take a different path—exploring ideas that a AAA studio might not.”
“Fresh and hard to categorize” is a fitting description for Alpha Channel’s debut project, TankHead, which mashes together the vehicular combat from your favorite tank simulator with the tried-and-tested cycle of taking down enemies, scavenging their remains for parts and upgrades, and using them to take down even bigger enemies. Throw in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting and mission-based progression, and it’s almost impossible to distill TankHead down into a 30-second elevator pitch. To prove this, I posed this challenge to the team at Alpha Channel, and Grujic’s response sums it up well: “TankHead is a unique vehicle-based roguelite, offering a cohesive blend of intense vehicular-action, exploration, and narrative worldbuilding.”
While the notion of tank combat might conjure up images of slow-moving metal behemoths, clunky controls, and a never-ending game of cat and mouse as you try to get the edge over your opponent with a perfect line of sight, TankHead is decidedly more fast-paced. Rather than piloting a slow heavy tank, you’re put behind the seat of a light tank, which can zip around at a healthy speed, perfect for juggling a few enemies at the same time. More accurately, you technically don’t pilot a tank at all. Instead, you are remotely piloting a drone called a Needle, which has the added benefit of detaching from your tank to scavenge around for parts and upgrades.
This modular upgrade system is impressive to see in action, and as Ebanks explained, a lot of care went into finding a balance between authenticity and variety.
“Believable functionality is at the core of our design process, including game design,” says Ebanks. “Weapons and gear need to look, sound, and behave in a mechanically feasible way. We’ve intentionally avoided designs that feel overly ‘sci-fi’ or far-fetched. Designing a weapon or tank component typically starts with real-life references, which we then filter through the TankHead lens. This might involve stripping back certain elements or exaggerating features that catch our interest. Often, we’ll combine multiple elements from different real-world sources—like blending WWII-era plane engines with a crane winch and gantry—to create something novel. In the end, the aesthetic leans toward authentic realism with a touch of the fantastic.”
The ability to swap out tank components on the fly can be oddly satisfying (slapping on heavy armor or an anti-tank gun onto your rig never gets old), but it also lends itself well to the game’s combat. At a moment’s notice, you could find yourself rolling across the plains of the ECA (Event Containment Area, where each mission begins) only to be ambushed by a swarm of incoming drones and tanks. For pilots caught off guard, such an attack can quickly lead to disaster. With enemy patrols popping up without much warning, and with limited resources at your disposal, missions can quickly go south if you run low on ammo or scrap for repairing your ship. There’s a fine balance to strike between completing optional objectives, scavenging for upgrade materials, and completing the mission at hand.
The team’s love of vehicular combat and armored vehicles is made crystal clear in TankHead’s opening hour, but the glue that holds the entire experience together—its roguelike elements—only came into the picture later on in the game’s development cycle. In fact, after digging through my treasure trove of old emails, I unearthed a press release from 2021 that described TankHead as a “Metroidvania-style game.”
“Development is often not a straightforward path, and it can take some experimentation to get the vision and balance just right,” Ebanks explained. “We established the core mechanics of the game early on—the drone, the modular tank, and the physical nature of the interactions, which we felt worked pretty well. However, figuring out how it all came together in a rewarding gameplay loop took some time. Bringing everything together in the end was a real team effort. The roguelite structure, introduced later in production, helped solidify the overall experience and put the combat front and center.”
With a strong foundation laid out, TankHead is brimming with potential, and while Alpha Channel has continued to refine the core experience and add new features (for you graphics junkies, the game was recently updated to support DLSS frame generation), the team remained tight-lipped about what might be coming down the pipeline. Some form of multiplayer seems like the obvious next step, and when asked about it, Ebanks acknowledged its potential, but wasn’t about to let anything slip.
“We think our gameplay loop could work really well in a co-op setting, but we’ll have to wait and see how things evolve.”
TankHead is available now, exclusively on Epic Games Store.