I vibe-coded a custom WebGPU engine for my MMO
Details
- External ID
- 47126560
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I vibe-coded a custom WebGPU engine for my MMO
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.10512129380053908
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
It took me about a week to vibe code this 3D game engine with Opus 4.6 that I intend to use as a replacement for Three.js and React Three Fiber in my browser MMORPG, Mana Blade.I was not expecting to be able to reach that point so easily, but pretty much every feature took somewhere between 30 minutes and 1 hour - 1 to 3 prompts on average. It is vibe-coded in the sense that I haven't looked at the code, but I am very careful with my prompts and constantly have Claude reviewing the codebase, looking for performance and code quality improvements.It can reach 2000 draw calls on recent integrated GPUs, such as modern phones or MacBooks, where Three.js usually starts dropping frames at 300-600 draw calls. I love Three.js, but I wanted to build something more minimal that does exactly what I need with better performance.I started with a C/WASM core but ended up sticking with JS because the performance difference wasn't significant enough for the number of entities in my game (never more than 500 entities).All in all, it was a fascinating experience, and I learned a lot about engines, even without typing a single line of code. It's pretty wild that we can now quite easily build in-house engines alongside our games as solo developers.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- custom webgpu engine for mmo games
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While an AI can generate boilerplate WGSL shaders and WebGPU pipeline wrappers, a robust custom 3D game engine ready for an MMO requires deep graphics architecture and low-level optimization.
What it would actually take: A performant 3D WebGPU engine requires writing custom WGSL shaders, managing buffer lifecycles, implementing frustum culling, hierarchical scene graphs, skeletal animations, and shadow maps. Vibe coding can scaffold basic rendering loops, but optimizing draw calls, memory layouts, and handling browser cross-platform WebGPU driver quirks requires experienced graphics engineering expertise.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: License of AI-generated code, Training data licensing implications
Competitors
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Attention rank: #317 of 339 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 117 days after the earliest competitor.
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- No other launches for this product.
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