Mike Mika among the many faces throughout the industry of gaming is one that many should be familiar with from his involvement in video games as he’s developed and shipped more than 100 different titles tracking back to the 90s with the original Game Boy. More recently, you would recognize Mika from his involvement in the documentary Atari: Game Over and his 2015 title #IDARB, a fun and competitive sports title where Twitch viewers & Twitter users can alter the game’s outcome.

Now Mika’s latest project similar to #IDARB focuses on using Microsoft-hosted Mixer where players are given the ability to control custom made tanks to play 2v2 soccer matches. Alongside working with the streaming platform, Mika also partnered with technology-focused website Tested to bring the project to reality.

Dubbed with the name ‘Project Tankball’, Mika and his team have been continuously working on the current project by 3D-printing several different tank models and inputting the ability to control them through Mixer.

“We started talking to Microsoft and the Mixer team years ago about how we could use their Mixplay functionality to create online games, which we thought was cool because the latency was some of the fastest we’d seen,” Mika shares. “We thought we could do some amazing games with that. We started doing several experiments, but the one that intrigued us the most was the idea of controlling real-world things with an audience.”

Following the same development process as his previous title, Mika plans to seek user-feedback to help better the game as him and his team continues to work on the project. Furthermore explaining that Project Tankball is planned to be more than just robot-controlled soccer and wants to introduce different scenarios for Mixer users to experience down the line.

Mika detailing that the initial plan for the project was aimed to be a first-person, tank-controlling shooter with virtual firefights. “We can add fake damage on tanks, we could have one of the treads slow down like it’s damaged … we could also throw virtual oil slicks or turbo boosts onto the field and see how players deal with that.” Adding on that the vision could still be implemented in the future.

As a little fun fact, Rectify Gaming was featured on #IDARB following the game’s 1.5 Update back in 2016.

Project Tankfall is currently live on Other Ocean’s Mixer account and you can participate in the remote-controlled tank fun now either on Xbox One or on Mixer via mobile or PC.

Source: Game Informer