Turbo Pack

This is the first Pocket Tanks expansion of 2022, and we are off to a good start! Once in a blue moon, a pack like this comes together that has amazing amounts of combo synergy. You’ll find weapons that hit hard, hit and run hard, hide and hit hard… and a weapon that auto targets your turret for the perfect next shot. This is the most fun I’ve had creating a new pack, and I think you’ll be able to tell once you play it. :)

Turbo Pack:

Turn things around fast with auto-locking cannons and other fun surprises! Fly overhead with Bombs Away, take cover with Crash Dive, and transform dirt into energy with Matter Blaster.

Turbo Cannon: Extremely fast energy bolts that auto center on the opponent's tank.

Bombs Away: Drops a bomb as your tank flies overhead.

Boring Missiles: Barrage of drill missiles burrow up through dirt then launch from the surface.

Crash Dive: Lob artillery shells while diving for cover under the terrain.

Matter Blaster: Convert all dirt near your tank into fuel for an energy bomb.

Stomper Pack

It’s time to try something new! No matter how many weapon packs I release, the first question I always get asked is always, “when are new weapons coming out?” In the spirit of making more weapons more quickly, I’m working on releasing smaller "paid weapon packs every few months. And as we approach the big release of Pocket Tanks on PC (Steam), this is the fastest way to keep us cranking out new weapons for your online battles. We have more in store than just new weapons for the next few decades, but this is good starting point. :)

Stomper Pack:

It's time to stomp, shove, and dig up the competition! Pull off crazy tank tricks like driving upside down and more. Brings new meaning to the words "hit and run".

Stomper: Hurl your tank end-over-end across the battlefield, leaving a path of destruction.

Dash: Race along the terrain, clinging to walls and bashing any tank in your way.

Mineshaft: Home in on and dig up enemy tanks that are hiding deep underground.

Warp Missiles: Warheads wrap around the edges of the screen for a surprise attack.

Bump Rockets: Barrage of projectiles that shove tanks around, causing them to skitter across the terrain.

20th Anniversary Mug and More

We released Pocket Tanks back in October of 2001 and it’s been a roller coaster ride ever since. Now in our 20th year, we are celebrating that milestone with the release of a new weapon pack, as well as three new items in the Gift Shop.

We are proud to be continuing the work, and these new items reflect the types of fans we’ve been lucky enough to meet with over the years:

20th Anniversary Mug:

Showcasing all 365 weapons created over the past 20 years, plus high-quality box art on both sides, this large 15oz mug is perfect for any Pocket Tanks fan.

Artillery Academy T-Shirt:

For all the Pocket Tanks veterans who started playing at computer labs in high school, university, and barracks all over the world, here is vintage design on a military green t-shirt that says “alumni” to everyone in the know. This t-shirt is super soft, and perfect for exercise and more.

Pocket Tanks Poster:

This is the nicest poster I’ve ever seen, Pocket Tanks or otherwise! Printed on fine art paper with a matte finish, the colors are incredibly vibrant and will look amazing in any room you put it in.

Twenty Pack

As we look back to our accomplishment over the past two decades, and look forward to the next two decades, we wanted to release something BIG to reaffirm our commitment to the game and it’s fans. Now there are 365 weapons in total… wow!

Twenty Pack:

Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Pocket Tanks with 20 new weapons! Go flying with Bungee Punch, beware the rubber ducky in Flash Flood, and bounce weapons off ceiling and walls.

Bungee Punch: Exploding punching glove that comes back if you miss.

Sticks & Stones: Fling huge boulders and sticks of dynamite across the playfield.

Coin Toss: Flip a coin and land it on the golden side for 3x damage.

Bombardment: Calls down cruise missiles from every corner of the sky.

Trench: Digs a deep trench between two locations on the terrain.

Rebound Lasers: Bouncy Laser beams that reflect off terrain, walls, and ceiling.

Ricochet Rifle: Zero-gravity sniper round that ricochets all over the place.

Bumper Bowling: Frenetic cannon ball causes damage based on speed of impact.

Reflex Missile: High-tech missile that has more electronics than firepower.

Magnablobs: Magnetized goo that immobilizes the opponent.

Retreat: Escape to the furthest point away from your opponent.

Super Retreat: Make a break for it, then take a parting shot behind a bouncy shield.

Rocket Launch: Precision line-of-sight rocket jump that can land you almost anywhere.

Firefight: Force your opponent to return fire immediately, for better or worse.

Auto Turrets: Robotic turrets spread out around your tank and launch a massive attack.

Sinker: Both tanks are driven deep into the ground.

Spike Pit: Digs a deep pit with a surprise at the bottom.

Flash Flood: Rubber ducky catches some waves that roll across the entire battlezone.

Vacuum Cannon: Space age vacuum that aims and throws opponent through the air.

Foundation: Builds a brick foundation at the bottom of the playfield.

Pocket Tanks Mugs

If you like the smell of coffee and napalm in the morning, then this is the mug for you! This is a large 15oz mug that is perfect for hot cocoa, milk and cookies, or my personal favorite… fresh brewed coffee. We have been looking for a way to put a Pocket Tanks logo on a black mug for years, and we are very happy with the results. Do you have a Pocket Tanks fan in your life that really needs one of these? I know that I do! Grab one today from the Gift Shop and help show your support for our our indie game efforts.

Three designs to choose from:
The Standard, Blit Ball (shown), and Iconic

Battery and Neutron Packs

Two new weapon packs have been released for owners of Pocket Tanks Deluxe. The Battery Pack includes 5 weapons to enjoy for free, and the Neutron Pack has 15 weapons to collect and master. These packs bring the total number of weapons up to 345 weapons, but there are more to come this year so make sure to keep with all the new stuff coming out for Pocket Tanks in 2021!

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Battery Pack:

Watch Sparkatron whiz and dart with uncanny precision, or overcharge a Battery for an explosive shock. Filled with sparks and electricity, you'll get a real charge out of these weapons!

Battery: Lightning bolts & fire fly from bouncing rechargable battery.

Knockback: Flurry of missiles that push the enemy tank into the ground.

Electric Putty: Electrified blocks of wet clay zap on impact.

Sparkatron: Weaponized gyroscope that sparks and ricochets.

Rampart: Construct, climb, and fire from the top of a defensive wall.

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Neutron Pack:

Surprisingly new tactics have arrived! Push, pull, and drag the competition with Wrecker, fire for effect with the Howitzer, and chase enemies with lasers using Neutron Beam and Zap Stix.

Neutron Beam: An unstoppable beam of neutrons auto-targets opponent.

Zap Stix: Laser light show that skips, seeks, & zaps what it encounters.

Wrecker: Slams the opponent's tank back and forth.

Wiggle Worm: Acrobatic worm that tumbles & tunnels it's way to the opponent.

Six Shooter: Rapid fire trick bullets that explode on second impact.

Howitzer: A cannon-launched guided projectile with very high accuracy.

Sandstone: A slurry of sand and chemicals that hardens on impact.

Flying Wall: An expanding line of shells that fly in formation.

Airburst: Large tank crushing & melting explosion that detonates before impact.

Flywheel: Winds-up a heavy disc that grinds through tanks and terrain.

Backflip: Send tanks spinning through the air end-over-end.

Snow Cone: Builds a snow cone shaped barrier around the opponent's tank.

Icicles: Blades of ice slice towards the opponent's tank.

Bridge: Builds bridge in direction of turret and then drives tank across.

Steamroller: Plow through and bury everything in your tank's path.

2021: 40 New Weapons for Pocket Tanks

We have been hard at work creating a whole bunch of new weapons for Pocket Tanks. What started out as a typical 20 weapon effort turned into a crazy plan to crank out 40 new weapons while we were in the zone! With a grand total of 365 weapons now ready-to-go, 2021 is going to showcase the most ground-breaking weapon packs you have ever seen.

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Summer of 2021:

Owners of Pocket Tanks Deluxe will see the release of the “free” Battery Pack (5), and the “for-sale” Neutron Pack (15) this summer.

Rampart:

Construct, climb, and fire from the top of a defensive wall.

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Neutron Beam:

An unstoppable beam of neutrons auto-targets opponent.

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Fall of 2021:

Coming Soon! To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Pocket Tanks, we are releasing a “Special Edition” weapon pack that includes 20 weapons that do fun stuff like bounce off the ceiling & walls, rocket your tank around the playfield, and more. Owners of Pocket Tanks Deluxe will see the “for-sale” Twenty Pack (20) arrive later this fall.

Ricochet Rifle:

Zero-gravity sniper round that ricochets all over the place.

Spike Pit:

Digs a deep pit with a surprise at the bottom.

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It took well over a year to produce all this new stuff, but as you saw in the release of the Puzzle Pack last year, our new weapon tech lets us create any weapon designs that we can possibly imagine. These 40 weapons represent some of the most advanced tactics and effects ever. And once you see the Flash Flood in action (Twenty Pack), you’ll know why it took so long! In the mid-2000’s we were able to make 20 weapons in about a month. These next-gen weapons take four times longer to create, so we guarantee that you will be pleasantly surprised.

We’ll be spending the rest of 2021 working on a big update to Pocket Tanks that will allow it to run on PC’s and play online games with people on their mobile devices. We have a LOT more planned after that, but that is our next big goal.

Enjoy the new weapons, and we’ll keep on making more! :)

Please visit our Gift Shop and buy some t-shirts, hoodies, and soon we’ll have mugs too. It’s a big encouragement to see those physical orders come in… a real morale boost for our grass-roots indie game efforts.

Thanks for playing!

-Mike
www.blitwise.com

Pocket Tanks Hoodies

It’s a little chilly outside, so it’s a good time to visit our Gift Shop and warm up with one of our new Pocket Tanks hoodies. Using the same high-quality vinyl art that we use for the t-shirts, these hoodies look great and are a fantastic way to show your support. I wear mine all the time, so join the club and we’ll keep pushing Pocket Tanks into the future.

Three designs to choose from:
The Standard, Blit Ball, and Iconic (shown)

New Weapons: Puzzle Pack

Fun surprises await when this Pandora's Box of weapons hits the battlefield. Teleportation and sleight of hand tricks are now at your disposal. Prepare to be puzzled!

New weapons include:

Puzzle Box: Colorful tile patterns spring from the box, then burst with energy.

Bouncy Blocker: Creates a ball of bouncy dirt directly in front of the opponent's turret.

Evac: Teleports your tank to a random location on the surface of the battlefield.

Sticker Shock: Magnetized Leyden Balls cling to tanks, delivering a coordinated electrical shock.

Barbed Wire: Spiraling coil of barbed wire unravels as it bounces across the terrain.

The Making of Puzzle Catcher

Puzzle Catcher is my best work so far, and I’m very proud of it! Come take a quick tour of the studio and see some of my sketches, notes, prototypes, and behind-the-scenes tools.

A little background: I’m a game coder from the 1990’s, and I’ve decided that I want to write game for the rest of my life. Every decision I make is in preparation for the creation of my masterwork creations many decades from now. I tend to write games as if I’m building a nuclear fallout shelter… using the most reliable, hardened, and easiest to maintain technologies. (That would be C/C++ for maximum portability and all the speed you’ll ever need.)

Here are a few pictures of my studio where I invent stuff every night:

Up the Stairs

I work above my garage. I’m big in to retrocomputing, so there may be a few Commodore Amiga computers laying around for tinkering and inspiration. I should bring out my Commodore 64’s soon.

The Big Screen

We write games that support mobile devices, but I primarily work with a touch screen laptop running Windows. I prefer editing my code on the laptop screen, and then running the game on a 55 inch TV. This helps me see every pixel! If I could afford a 100 inch TV, I would buy one. (That would make it a lot easier to see “every pixel” at 4k resolutions)

The Amiga Corner

Scorched Tanks is the first game I ever released way back in 1993, and it’s running great on this Amiga 500. My trusty Amiga 1200 is off screen, and that’s where I can be caught playing Megaball AGA from time to time.

The Books That Built Puzzle Catcher

These books served me well during the creation of Puzzle Catcher. The quilting book “Color Play” taught me about color theory and patterns. “Computational Geometry in C” and “Graphics Gems 3” had algorithms on various ways to slice and dice lines and polygons. Books about M.C. Escher and tessellating patterns were hugely influential in creating tile sets and board designs. And to write my new User Interface (UI) framework, I had to bring out the “big guns” for programming a system that is 100% data-driven and supports scripting. (Lua is awesome!)

Tacking on the creation of the Zoom framework caused this humble six month project to turn into a four year adventure. However, it was also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to write the technology that will keep my games working great and looking razor sharp in the distant future. Writing your own game engine in C/C++ is a serious commitment, but it’s safer in the long run than just buying an engine off-the-shelf.

(CAUTION: New developers first need to make a name for themselves with any tool they can find. The “long run” is for after your games start to “capture lightning in a bottle”, when it’s worth looking at 10 to 20 years down the road. I’m already there, so your mileage may vary.)

In 2014, I finally had the opportunity to create a prototype for the game I had been dreaming of during the development of Super DX-Ball. It took me 10 years to finally take the plunge.

Super Puzzle is Born

Using a ton of technology lifted from Super DX-Ball, I threw this game prototype together in a few weeks. (level editor, brick collisions, brick falling code, etc…)

Too Many Screen Sizes These Days!

Up to this point, we were able to tweak Pocket Tanks to look good on all the latest iOS and Android devices. It wasn’t easy, but we managed by manually adjusting everything every button to all the wild new device resolutions. But if we were going to make new games, and easily update Pocket Tanks in the future, we needed a fully modern UI framework that can handle every resolution. Enter Zoom, the BlitWise in-house UI framework.

Somehow this simple game idea turned into the poster child for a huge engine technology upgrade. If I had known that Zoom was going to take 3+ years to create, I might have never started writing the game! The trouble is that there are simply no open source UI frameworks for plain old C/C++. After exhaustive research, I decided that a combination of QT’s QML language and World of Warcraft’s XML/Lua modding framework sounded just right for us.

Zoom Lives!

This doesn’t look like much, but it took me a year just to get this far. Writing an entity-based engine that is similar to the latest and greatest tools like Unity3d is very exciting work, but deeply technical! It’s fun to write this kind of stuff, but wasn’t I supposed to be writing a game? It’s hard to be a jack-of-all-trades game programmer sometimes.

Interns to the Rescue

After a year of working on Zoom, I invited some talented students to visit the BlitWise studio once a week to help me test out the new Zoom system. No C/C++ compiler was needed, just a text editor and the ability to edit .xml and .lua files. We made silly demos like this “Bubbles” example. Here, Lua code is attached to each bubble object causing it to wobble and float to the top of the screen. This is a radical departure from my typical 1990’s C/C++ “hard code everything” style.

It’s often a bad sign when game developers start writing tools instead of games all while quoting Carl Sagan’s famous line, “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” I definitely fell into that trap, but eventually there was enough of the Zoom finished so that I could start writing the actual game. So I rolled up my sleeves and got back to designing.

Start With The Logo

For some reason, I can’t take a game project seriously until is has proper logo and title screen. It’s like I need the logo to anchor my mind and set the tone for the rest of the project. As you can probably tell, these early sketches were not doing it for me. I really needed a name that I liked.

Getting Close

I was looking for something with a demoscene vibe, and this lettering fit the bill. The triangular curved tiles on the bottom helped hint at the gameplay as well as give it a sporty & energetic look. I was still trying to sneak “Catcher” in there somewhere. This was close enough, so it was time to bust out Blender3D and make it come to life.

Time to Make the Title Screen

With a proper logo designed, a title screen sets the stage for the entire game. This is pretty darn close to exactly what I made for the final game.

Early Game Screen Sketch

Originally I wanted the “tumbler” on the left to be a GameBoy-like sci-fi device that projected the “hologlass”, a solid holographic display, on the right. I worked hard on several graphical effects to sell that idea, but mobile devices just didn’t have that kind of horsepower back in 2016.

With a mind full of ideas, a notebook full of sketches, and even some finished artwork, it was time to start getting stuff on the screen!

Super DX-Ball’s Level Editor Saves the Day

Back in 2003, It took me a year to write TEdit, the level editor for Super DX-Ball. TEdit is perfect for exploring the possible tile sets and also making the board packs. This is “Happy Frog” from the Brilliance Pack.

Filling Things In

To create a board, I use the tiles to draw a level. Later on, when loading the board into the game, I use various algorithms to punch out that hole where the tiles were placed on the screen. When playing Puzzle Catcher, all you see is an empty shape where you can place any tiles that you like. This is the “Fiery Steed” level from the Fire Diamonds Pack.

Beautiful Patterns

Often I create board packs with recognizable objects and catchy names that are easy for players to remember and talk about. But towards the end my level design efforts, I took a chance and made levels with more abstract patterns that are inspired by quilting. My wife does not quilt, but this is her favorite pack! This level is “Around the Clock” from the Rolling Stars Pack.

Dreams Come True

This was the first time that the Zoom framework was used in a real game. We had a few bumps and bruises along the way, but this technology makes quick work of UI that look great on iPhone3G, iPhoneX, iPad Pro, and the Android device flavor of the month.

Putting It All Together

After several years of combined engine and game work, it all started to come together in 2017. Here you can see the sketches and board designs come to life.

In the final analysis, I should have had a team of 8 people to complete this game in 6 months as originally planned. Some folks would say that I tried to boil the ocean by making my own UI framework. It was more like I tried to boil a swimming pool, but I got it done eventually. Writing your own game engine from scratch is not for the faint of heart, but it is the best way to gain mastery of your tools. If you switch tools/languages/engines every 5 years, the you will always be a generalist and will eventually fall behind. If you want to be writing games for your whole life, then you should consider crafting your own tools and start crystallizing your experience today. When you actively enhance the same code base over a long period of time, that’s better than starting over and over with someone else’s frameworks. Who says that their ideas are better than yours anyways? Be bold!

Puzzle Catcher was a pleasure to make, and it’s built to last. I’d be honored if you would download it today and give it a try. If you would like to chat with me about this game, or any of my other game projects, then come visit our BlitWise Games community forums. See you there!

Pocket Tanks T-Shirts

Come checkout our t-shirt designs at the new Gift Shop. The multi-color vinyl art looks amazing on black, and the designs will last for years! Plus keep an eye out for new t-shirts, hoodies, embroidered polo’s, posters, stickers, and more for Pocket Tanks and all our other games. We’ve designed a lot of neat stuff over the years for wearing to conventions and sprucing up the office. If you play Pocket Tanks on a daily basis, then you may need some official Pocket Tanks gear. We got you covered!

New BlitWise Website!

Like an old rocker who’s been partying like it’s 1999 for a few too many years, it was time to give our website a proper face lift. Thanks for checking out our new site, and if you’d like to visit our old site, click here for a blast from the past.

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Our website was very 1998, even when we created it in 2001. :)