I Built a Wiki for a Game Where the In-Game Menus Tell You Nothing

Point Blank Zero is a fast-paced FPS with a problem that every competitive shooter has: the game tells you weapons exist but not how they actually perform. Damage falloff at range, time-to-kill at different armor levels, recoil patterns — none of this is in the game.

After getting destroyed by a gun I had never seen before for the third time in one session, I decided to fix this the only way a developer knows how: build a wiki.

What pbzerowiki.com Covers

pbzerowiki.com is a community-maintained knowledge base for PBZ. It catalogs:

• Every weapon with damage stats, effective range, TTK, and recommended attachments
• Map layouts with callout positions, spawn points, and objective locations
• Game modes with rule breakdowns, scoring mechanics, and strategy guides

The idea is simple: if the game will not tell you how a mechanic works, the wiki will. Every page links to related content so you can go from "what is this gun" to "how do I counter it on this specific map" in three clicks.

The Build

Static HTML, vanilla CSS, zero JavaScript framework. The site is a collection of hand-written HTML pages with a shared navigation system and search that works via browser-native input + datalist — no Elasticsearch, no Algolia, no third-party search dependency.

Why plain HTML? Because game wikis should load instantly. Players alt-tab between the game and the browser. A 2-second load time is a 2-second spawn delay. The entire site loads in under 500ms on a cold cache.

The content system is markdown files converted to HTML pages with a Python build script. Adding a new weapon page is: write markdown, run build.py, deploy. Takes about 3 minutes from idea to live.

Why Not Fandom/Wikia?

Fandom wikis are the default for gaming, but they have become borderline unusable: auto-playing video ads, 40% of the screen taken by sticky elements, and JavaScript that chokes mobile browsers. pbzerowiki loads on a 3G connection in under 2 seconds. No ads, no popups, no cookie consent banners that cover the content.

What's Next

The weapon database is about 80% complete. Maps and game mode guides are being added weekly. If you play PBZ and want to contribute a page: pbzerowiki.com.