Planned Release Date: December 2026

About This Game

I learned to program first in C++, then in Java, and in 2018 I started writing this game. I dropped it more than once and only finished it in 2026, when AI helped with the art, sound and code. I wrote the rules, automated checks and instructions for it myself, based on my own experience. I put my whole heart and my love of 8-bit games into Tanks 2026, and I wanted to bring back the cozy feeling of childhood, when a game could hold you spellbound and inspire you. Enjoy the game!

Hold the base. Smash the walls. Claim your rewards.

Tanks 2026 is a top-down tank battle in the spirit of old 8-bit games. Enemy tanks keep rolling in while you hold your base, blast holes in brick walls and grab the cards that flashing tanks leave behind.

Two modes

CLASSIC has 35 stages. On every fifth one, the blocks on the map form a shape or an object. Enemies here wander at random, like in old 8-bit games.

In RANDOM, the field fills the whole screen: 50 by 36 tiles and 40 enemies in two waves. Playing is more comfortable this way, and the battles get bigger. Each campaign is generated from scratch, so no two runs are the same.

The enemies here are smarter: some head straight for your base, while others stalk your tank but keep their distance as long as you still have CALL or JUMP. The more rewards you have switched on, the more dangerous they get.

Clean stages, rewards to keep

Clear a CLASSIC stage without losing a tank, and it counts as clean. Do that on all 35 stages of one difficulty, and the game lets you pick one of two rewards. The reward stays with you for good and works on every difficulty, and you can switch it off if you like. For example, FIRE TRAIL leaves fire behind your tank for five seconds: it burns enemies, melts ice and boils off water.

Cards that bite back

VEST, CAMERA, PICKAXE, LEVEL UP, BOMB, HEART and WRENCH help you, and red cards get in your way. VODKA can reverse the controls of everyone nearby or send them drifting, or it can take a level from a tank, shrink it to half its size or turn it into a bulldozer that flattens everything in its path, even the base. SUMMON releases a mole, a raven or a ghost: the mole chews through walls, the raven steals your card, and the ghost makes every enemy invisible. Enemies pick up cards too. You can turn red cards off under ANTI-POWER-UPS in the SETTINGS menu.

Once a stage: call and jump

CALL pulls the nearest enemy straight to you, and JUMP throws your tank four tiles over walls, water and shots. When it lands, the tank crushes the brick and steel underneath and destroys an enemy next to it, while an armored enemy loses one armor stripe. Crush two at once and each one scores double. With a DualSense plugged in by cable, you can give the CALL by voice: just shout into the gamepad's microphone. Speech is recognized offline in English, Russian and Ukrainian.

Two looks, two soundtracks

Play with big chunky 8-bit pixels or switch GRAPHICS to HD. The switch spreads through the menu like quicksilver, and the music keeps playing without a break. In HD, everything is redrawn with four times the detail, with its own font and richer sound. The grass gives away anyone hiding in it, and a bomb burns it away for ten seconds. PIXEL keeps it old-school and harder: the grass hides everyone.

Two players, one screen

Play together on one computer, each with your own lives and score. Share one keyboard or use two gamepads, DualSense or Xbox. The gamepad rumbles with every hit. A DualSense glows in your tank's color and, when plugged in by cable, plays sounds through its built-in speaker.

Features

• 35 stages in CLASSIC and a RANDOM mode where every run is new

• Four enemy types and three difficulty levels

• Six rewards: on each difficulty, one of two is yours and the other goes to your partner

• Two-player co-op on one screen

• DualSense and Xbox gamepad support

• LEADERBOARD with three-letter initials

• Continue from where you left off

• 1,000 bonus points for a stage where you never get hit

• English, Russian and Ukrainian, plus a joke version in the style of the clumsy translations on early-2000s discs

• The game switches on and off like an old tube TV

Credits

Some of the sounds, the voices, the font and the libraries in the game are free work by other people. Thanks to them:

• Sound effects: @Shades, 8-bit Sound Effects Pack 001 (CC0); Frogpog, Chiptune SFX Pack (CC0); michellegrobler, Old Camera Flash (Freesound, via Pixabay)

• Announcer voices: Piper Dmitri and Joe (CC0), Mykyta (Apache 2.0)

• Font: Press Start 2P (The Press Start 2P Project Authors, SIL OFL 1.1)

• Libraries: LWJGL 3 (BSD 3-Clause), SDL3 (zlib), Opus (BSD 3-Clause), Vosk (Apache 2.0), JNA (Apache 2.0)

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

I used AI tools to make some of the content in this game:
- the sprites in both the pixel and the HD look, the HD font and the logo;
- the music: my own tunes, played by a generator written with AI help;
- most of the sound effects, and the HD versions of all of them;
- the announcer's voice, made with Piper, an open-source text-to-speech tool;
- the translations.
The store art is made from the HD sprites and the logo with AI help. The trailer and screenshots are real gameplay footage, edited with AI help; the voice line in the trailer uses the announcer's voice. I checked and adjusted every piece by hand. Nothing is generated by AI while you play.