Tank Blitz 3D
The version he learned on. Hills, a sniper scope, a free-look camera, and a block of numbers at the top of the file that he is allowed to break.
Opens in a new tab. Works on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop.
- Built by
- Otto, age 11
- When
- Summer 2026
- Kind
- Workshop
- Made with
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Three.js, MySQL
This is the first tank game, and it is still the one we open when he wants to change something. At the top of game3d.js there is a block called TWEAK: player speed, bullet speed, reload time, enemy health, enemy speed. Plain numbers with a comment beside each one.
The rule is one change at a time. Edit a number, save, reload the browser, play for thirty seconds. Keep it if the game got better, put it back if it did not. He set reload time to 0.1 in the first week and discovered that a machine gun is not fun for very long.
Beside it he built a Game Brain, a small database of tank design facts he can search in plain English and add his own ideas to. It runs on my Mac rather than on the web, because an eleven year old with a public database is an incident waiting to happen. It is still the clearest way I have found to explain what retrieval is: you do not ask the model to remember, you give it somewhere to look.
What it taught Otto
- Changing one number and watching what happens is the entire job. He got that in an afternoon.
- Faster is not better. Reload at 0.1 seconds made the game boring in under a minute, and he could say why.
- A database you can ask questions is not magic. He had to teach it every fact in it before it could answer anything.