SUPACOOLGAMES
Bolo3K
Take bases with your tank. Take pillboxes with your little green man. Take the island.
in build A Roblox experience. Not published yet.
01 What Bolo3K is
Bolo3K is a rebuild of Bolo, Stuart Cheshire's 1987 multiplayer tank game for the Macintosh, as a native Roblox experience. Sixteen players share one island. Each drives a tank and commands a little green man who gets out and builds.
It is not a port. Bolo2K is the faithful remake, and it runs in a browser today. Bolo3K is the successor: the same island and the same rules, in block-built 3D under a top-down camera, on one codebase across PC, mobile and console.
02 The island
The island is 256 tiles square, and a tile is 24 studs in Roblox. Every tile is one kind of ground, and the ground decides what you can do on it: roads are fast, swamp is slow, forest hides you, deep water stops you unless you are on a boat.
Three things stand on the ground and all three change hands. Bases refuel a tank parked on one, handing over armor, shells and mines out of their own stock, so refueling is a transfer and not a gift. Pillboxes shoot at anyone who is not their owner or their owner's ally. Mines sit hidden in the ground until something drives over them.
The game's own art, at the camera's angle. Ownership is a color: these are yours.
- Your tank takes bases. Shoot a base until its armor is low enough, then drive onto it.
- Your little green man takes pillboxes, and builds the roads, walls and boats, farms trees for materials, and lays mines. He walks the whole way, however far you send him, and he is defenseless while he works.
03 How a round is won
A round ends the moment every base on the island belongs to one player or to that player's allies. A single neutral base stops anyone from holding the island. If nobody has taken it after twenty minutes, the clock decides it on bases held.
The winner is a player together with their allies - and an ally holding no base at the end is credited with nothing. Then the island resets to the map its author drew, forests, walls, bases and pillboxes back where they started.
Twenty minutes is a first setting. It is the one number in the game with no source behind it, because Bolo has no round at all, and it will be tuned in playtests.
04 Alliances are pacts, not teams
Nobody is assigned a side. Two players are allied when each has asked for the other; a request on its own is nothing. An alliance is a player plus everyone they hold a pact with, and that is the unit that wins a round.
Your ally's ally is not your ally.
A pact is not transitive, and the game means it: one player allied with two who are not allied with each other is a single alliance seen from the middle and two separate ones seen from either edge. Who has won is worked out from each base owner's own side of the table.
What a pact gets you, and what it costs:
- Allied pillboxes hold their fire, and open up again the moment the pact ends.
- You refuel at an ally's bases, and the base never changes hands for it.
- You see the mines your ally laid after the pact formed, and only those. The tick a pact became mutual is stamped once and never refreshed, so a pair cannot break and remake a pact to uncover each other's older mines. When the pact ends, those mines go dark again.
- Pacts outlive the round. The island resets; who you trust does not.
Leaving clears only the leaver's own request. The other side goes on wanting the alliance, and the pact is remade the instant the leaver asks again.
05 What is different from Bolo
Most of Cheshire's rules are kept, measured against a reference implementation rule by rule. These are the deliberate changes:
| Driving | Rebuilt. Bolo's 1987 motion model travels on a 16-point compass and feels it. Bolo3K's tank turns and drives the way you expect, with cruise control and reverse as options you can switch on. |
|---|---|
| The round | New. Bolo runs forever; Bolo3K plays a round, on an island that persists between rounds. |
| Mines | A mine sets off the mines on its four sides a fifth of a second later, and each of those does the same. |
| Rough ground | A tank turns at four tenths of its speed on rough ground, so terrain costs you maneuver as well as pace. |
| Forests | Cheshire's self-adjusting rule is back: the more players in the game, the faster forests regrow, because more players consume more building material. |
06 Where it is now
The rules simulation is written and tested, the tank handling is settled, a full game reaches every player's screen, and each client is told only what its player is allowed to see. Block art and recorded sound are in hand. What remains is playtesting, the Roblox integration, and launch.
There is nothing to download and nothing to play yet. This page will carry the link when there is one.