I built Battle Tanks, a browser tank shooter with a Battle City soul

I just put out Battle Tanks, a top-down tank arena shooter that runs in your browser.

It takes the classic Battle City formula (drive a tank, blast bricks, defend, destroy) and layers a modern roguelite power-up ladder on top, all rendered in full 3D low-poly. No download, no install, just open it and play.

Battle Tanks was built with a lot of AI help. I'll walk through what that actually meant near the end.

Why I built it

I grew up with Battle City, and I wanted to see if I could capture that exact feeling: tight arenas, brick you can chew through, a base you are trying to protect, but give it the kind of run-based progression that keeps me playing modern games.

I also wanted something that ran instantly in a browser and looked genuinely good doing it. The whole thing is client-side, so there is no lobby, no account, no wait. You click and you are in a tank.

Fight through waves, gear up, take down the boss

You survive escalating waves of enemy tanks across 12 hand-built arenas, each with its own brick maze, water hazards, tree cover, or lava lake. The enemies are not all the same, either: grunts, snipers, splitters, shielded armor, and stationary bunkers all want you dead in different ways.

Every fifth wave caps off with a boss fight against the Titan: a scaled-up tank with twin heavy barrels and a pulsing weak-point core. And if you survive past the final arena, it does not end. The level roster loops, and enemies come back with more health and more damage each time around.

Stack your loadout

The part I care about most is the build. Clear a wave, pick an upgrade, and those upgrades carry across the whole run and stack with each other:

• Weapons: Laser (pierces tanks and brick), Rocket (splash damage), Spread Gun (a 3-way fan)
• Offense: Ricochet, Homing Shots, Overcharge, Extra Bullet, Rapid Fire, and Overdrive (kills briefly boost your fire rate)
• Survival: Tough Armor, Extra Life, Ghost Plating, Adrenaline, Scrap Armor (kills can heal you), and Second Wind (cheat death once a wave)
• Utility: Speed Boost, Power Shot (breaks steel), Mines, and Juggernaut (ram enemies for free damage)

A homing-laser build plays completely differently from a mines-and-juggernaut brawler, and that is the whole point. Two runs should not feel the same.

Play solo or drop in a second player

Battle Tanks has local 2-player co-op on the same keyboard, with shared upgrades and twin-stick chaos. There are touch controls too, so it works on mobile and tablet browsers.

Action	Player 1	Player 2
Move	WASD	Arrow keys
Shoot	Space	Enter
Pause	Esc / P	—

The tech behind it

Battle Tanks is built with Three.js (r171), running on WebGPU where the browser supports it and falling back to WebGL automatically. It is written in strict TypeScript with a fixed-step simulation loop, and like ARCOLOGY there is no backend: everything runs client-side.

The fixed-step simulation was the detail that mattered most. With a lot of bullets, mines, and tanks on screen at once, you want the game logic to run at a stable rate independent of frame rate, so a laptop and a phone play the same even when one is rendering far fewer frames.

Building it with AI

AI tools helped me move fast through the Three.js rendering setup, the WebGPU/WebGL fallback plumbing, the enemy behaviors, and a lot of the power-up wiring. What stayed mine was the game feel: the pacing of the waves, when the boss shows up, how the upgrades interact, and the endless-loop difficulty curve. Those are the things you can only get right by playing your own game over and over and being annoyed by it.

Realistically, without AI this stays a half-finished side project. Twelve arenas, a couple dozen stacking power-ups, boss fights, co-op: that's a lot to build solo in spare time, and AI is the reason it got past the 60-percent-done stage instead of stalling there.

Play it

It's all in the browser, nothing to install:

• Play Battle Tanks

Bring a friend for the co-op. It gets loud.