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Steel Tide has a website, a wiki and a blog

·by Rene Wang·2 min read

The game now lives next to a bilingual site: a landing page, a wiki page for every unit and building with stats read straight from the game, and this blog.

Until today, everything about Steel Tide lived inside the game or in a README. That works for a prototype and stops working the moment someone asks a question like "what actually counters a Mammoth?" and the honest answer is "open the source and read the multiplier table".

So the repository is now a monorepo with two halves. game/ is the game exactly as before: TypeScript, Vite, a Canvas 2D renderer, and the Bun server. web/ is a Next.js site with three jobs.

A page for every unit and building

The wiki has a page for each of the 25 units and 19 buildings. The tactical notes on each page are written by hand, in English and Chinese, as MDX files. The numbers are not: the stats panel, the weapon table and the "countered by" list are read from the game's own definition file at build time. When a balance change lands in defs.ts, the wiki is right the next time it deploys, and nobody has to remember to edit a table.

The counter web page takes that further and renders the complete matrix of every armed unit against every armor class. It is the same table the AI uses to pick what to build against you.

Thumbnails are the game's own sprite sheets, cropped to their first frame at build time with the turret composited on its mount, so the picture on the page is the picture in the game.

Two languages, one URL scheme

Every page exists under /en/ and /zh/, and the switcher in the header keeps you on the same page when you change language. A page that has not been translated yet falls back to the other language with a note, rather than disappearing. The game itself has been bilingual since the first build, so the wiki inherits its unit names and descriptions from the same string table.

The blog

This is the third job. Release notes, design notes and the occasional engineering story about how a browser RTS is put together will land here. The next post is about the dedicated server.

Playing

None of this changes the game: it still runs at the same address, installs to a phone as before, and the one-line server installer is unchanged. If you have never played, the getting started guide is the place to begin.