Hedra
an open-world 3D game I wrote from scratch before LLMs
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With the current inflow of LLM aided software, I thought I would share a cool "hand-coded" project from the previous era (I wrote this in highschool so roughly ~8 years ago).Hedra is an open world 3d game written from scratch using only OpenGL and C#. It has quite a few cool features like infinite generation, skinned animated mesh rendering, post processing effects, etc. Originally the physics engine was also written from scratch but i swapped for the more reliable bulletphysics.
HN · launched Mar 14, 2026 · 11 upvotes (top 39%) · 0 views
Niche: indie video games · 203 launches, 20 in the last 7 days ▼ -23% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Hardware & robotics
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 203 launches in indie video games →
Could you build this?
No Writing a custom 3D open-world game engine from scratch in C# and raw OpenGL with procedural infinite world generation demands deep computer graphics, linear algebra, and systems optimization expertise.
What it would actually take: Requires an OpenGL/Vulkan rendering pipeline built in C++ or C#, custom shader development (GLSL), octree/voxel spatial partitioning, procedural terrain algorithms (e.g., SIMD-accelerated Simplex/Perlin noise with marching cubes), and custom memory management for seamless chunk streaming. Implementing this without an existing game engine requires specialized domain knowledge in graphics engineering and real-time physics simulation.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 210 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #99 of 211 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 129 days after the earliest competitor.
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