Tanks Devlog 001

- 2 mins read

This is the first in a series of posts explaining the development of Tanks - the web project I have been working on for the last few months.

Tanks is based on the classic Wii game Wii Play Tanks. A quick youtube search will show several hour long speedrun videos with hundreds of thousands of views. In the game, a user controls a small tank in a top down 2.5D scene and must defeat all enemy tanks to progress to the next level.

Initial Research

I started by listing the features I definitely wanted to implement for this project:

  • Multiplayer support
  • 2.5D graphics
  • Easy to play (intuitive controls and no logins or complex menus)

And I listed out the developer experience I wanted:

  • Fast iteration cycle
  • Use some sort of 3D game engine/library

Tech Stack

After looking at some options, I landed on using ThreeJS. Unity or Godot seemed like decent alternatives, but ThreeJS seemed to have the fastest iteration cycle - and it helps that I have some prior javascript experience.

The ThreeJS documentation is well written, and it helps that there are a ton of cool demos and examples to learn from:

Multiplayer Support

The bulk of my research was centered around how to implement multiplayer support as I have no experience at all with networked games.