I started this game almost 10 years ago in high school as a way to learn OpenGL. Scope creep quickly took over, and it eventually became a full 3D game and engine with animations, rendering effects, dynamic terrains, etc, with ~100k lines of code and native Linux and Windows support.
Thought I'd share it! With AI coding now, it feels like a relic of another era. Crazy to imagine writing 100k lines by hand today!
adamddev1 22 hours ago [-]
Very cool and thanks for sharing! It's inspiring to see that yes, one person can build something like this. And of course it does NOT have that immediate AI feel. Just a glance and you can feel that it is a true, original work of art. It's also sad to think that so many will not be learning as much as you did thinking this all out and coding by hand.
I think we need to keep pushing back against this idea that "now it's the AI coding era, everything gets coded with AI." Let's keep building things, especially passion projects carefully by hand and normalizing this. Lots of us are still coding without AI.
jan_m_savage 9 hours ago [-]
This is exactly why I am still writing on Quora, advocating that people continue to learn how to program.
Bradbury's book is almost becoming a reality.
wellidisagree 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fasterik 20 hours ago [-]
Doing things by hand is part of the learning process. Sure, you can prompt an AI to one-shot a 3D open world game, but you'll learn nothing about programming, computer graphics, or game design. That domain knowledge makes you more effective with the AI tools when you choose to use them. What you're saying might apply to experienced engineers, but not a high school kid learning the craft for the first time.
And yes, there will be people who have no interest in learning and just want to manage the AI to do everything for them. I remain skeptical that (manager + AI) will beat (domain expert + AI). It's possible that the relevant kinds of expertise will evolve, but I'm betting on some form of expertise remaining relevant for a long time.
fennecbutt 20 hours ago [-]
My friend and I were in the car the other day and I remarked on the same thing.
Historically engineers and artists were two different kinds of people, often making fun of each other, especially the former of the latter because of the "starving artist" meme.
But what I've realised since is that engineers are now realising that we were artists all along.
And now there's a division in our ranks, those who use tools to get the job done and those who enjoy the process of writing all their code by hand, aka their art.
I can appreciate both, but I'm not going to pretend that I'd waste time in a business environment doing the latter when I should be doing the former. My friend only wants to do the latter and said he'd change careers if it gets too bad.
pell 19 hours ago [-]
There are commits from before 2020 even and the project clearly marks "pre-ai" development too. If you look for it on the web you find the first postings about it in 2020 already too.
emmettbt 15 hours ago [-]
this seems to be a bit contrarian?
anonymous908213 19 hours ago [-]
> The product is the product.
What is the product made of? Code. If it's dogshit code, it's a dogshit product. So too with every "one-shot" 3D game Codex might spit out for you. It can make something that appears impressive the first time you look at it, but that nobody would ever play for more than 5 minutes because the facade falls over the moment it comes into contact with reality.
amirkhanian 56 minutes ago [-]
Ten years on a single game — that’s quite something. Was there ever a point where you felt like giving it all up and just using an off-the-shelf engine instead?
aoguerrero 18 hours ago [-]
I got the game and it runs smooth on my aging PC, I really enjoyed playing it.
I really appreciate the amount of effort and skill put on this, because I tried many times to get into the 3D gaming programming and OpenGL and I found it far from my skills and patience.
Is a truly piece of art, made with passion for programming, thanks for that!
jh3nd3rs0n 23 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing. It's nice to see a game made without AI.
dachris 22 hours ago [-]
Kudos, that looks very good for a high school coding project (both visuals, and the code looks very well structured).
I feel like half of all software devs started out like this - coding their own game.
Crazy to imagine that no one will build their mental muscle like this anymore.
I sure learnt so much analytical thinking, debugging, problem solving and banging my head against a mental wall until the wall yielded through passion hobby projects like this. Wouldn't have been the same just saying "Claude, make [insert game here]".
adamddev1 22 hours ago [-]
I think "no one will build their mental muscle like this anymore" is a bit defeatist. I am still pushing myself coding new and challenging things by hand, not using AI at all for it.
fasterik 18 hours ago [-]
I agree, the people who care will still push themselves to learn. There's a concern about education for the ones who don't care, but that's a separate issue and was present long before AI came along.
Jare 10 hours ago [-]
> Crazy to imagine that no one will build their mental muscle like this anymore.
> [...] Wouldn't have been the same just saying "Claude, make [insert game here]"
I think this trope is greatly exaggerated. I'm sure a lot of people try that (and then quickly move on to whatever meme is next), but why is it often presented as the only thing people do with AI?
AI has changed the baselines, but building stuff is still going to be driven by a effort -> outcomes function. And effort leads to learning. I wrote machine code bytes by hand in the 80s, and in the 90s I already lamented that kids these days lo longer knew how things really work... but kids with interest and curiosity were actually just as fine as always.
kjuulh 8 hours ago [-]
That looked like a really fun project, and quite the persistence you've got to actually stick with it for such a long time. I might have to give it a try when i get home.
sublinear 22 hours ago [-]
I hope I don't sound rude for saying this, but "relic of another era" isn't how I'd describe the time before LLMs.
We're very much still in the same era as back then. I hope every dev realizes by now that there's no meaningful difference between a git clone back then and using LLMs now.
Projects like yours contributed to the source "training data". It's only plagiarism when people didn't publish their source with this intent.
maxilevi 22 hours ago [-]
I get what you mean and I agree but I wanted to highlight the difference between this and all the vibe coded games opus 5.5 can one shot
22 hours ago [-]
sublinear 22 hours ago [-]
Yes NLP has come a long way and LLMs allow easier "searching" of the solution.
The one shot results vary in quality because in order for the result to align with something good, you're playing a guessing game which description(s) match the desired output. Needing to know what's on both sides of the curtain is in some ways potentially double the effort of not bothering with an LLM in the first place.
It's also for this reason I'm skeptical of the more "specialized" models. They're basically inflatable bumpers on the bowling lanes mapping to limited outputs that might not even be as good as the training source. Might as well just give me the github link at that point and we're right back to copypasta in the 2010s.
jacobgkau 22 hours ago [-]
> I hope every dev realizes by now that there's no meaningful difference between a git clone back then and using LLMs now.
There is a difference between running a command to copy someone else's entire project (which you might then do whatever with, including manually building on top of or copying things from), and running a prompt to generate a new project (which you're then going to consider "your own").
F3nd0 11 hours ago [-]
> I hope every dev realizes by now that there's no meaningful difference between a git clone back then and using LLMs now.
> It's only plagiarism when people didn't publish their source with this intent.
Yes. And they didn’t. Unless they were public domain (which most libre projects chose not to be), they absolutely didn’t and I can’t begin to imagine how you arrived at your conclusion.
pjmlp 21 hours ago [-]
Kudos for achieving it, and extra brownie points for the effort to go with C# instead the more common options.
emmanueloga_ 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
panza 19 hours ago [-]
Very humbling to see that this was created in high school and without AI.
Side note: it's interesting to see how 'wrote from scratch' or 'hand written' is used in 2026. I've seen it used to mean literally everything, while others might mean they wrote the core of the engine + some SDL sprinkled throughout. And now, it could just mean 'didn't use AI at all'.
serf 18 hours ago [-]
yeah.
my mind is still stuck in an era where "written from scratch" means no packages and pure language.
people older than me scoff at the concept of how easy it is to be given an already working compiler..
'computers' probably have one of the most diverse fanbases as far as age and expectation goes of nearly anything around, and we're definitely entering a new era.
skyberrys 23 hours ago [-]
I appreciate your low-poly aesthetic. I bet you and like half this website have written a video game in highschool. You have found the right group to tell about it.
esFran 44 minutes ago [-]
It looks AMAZING
merlinthegreen 9 hours ago [-]
Is hedra-tools supposed to be private? Having a non-public git submodule makes this very hard to work with!
maxilevi 9 hours ago [-]
Oops, will open source too!
jan_m_savage 9 hours ago [-]
Noice! Though I wonder why you had chose C#. (Not that anything is wrong, just curious).
maxilevi 9 hours ago [-]
IMO better syntax and VM than Java and easier to write performant code than other VM based langs like Python + good tooling
jan_m_savage 9 hours ago [-]
thanks, agree
chrysoprace 19 hours ago [-]
I think it's really cool that you built the game around a mod API - I think all games should do this, and I love projects that were built for the love of the craft.
downback 5 hours ago [-]
Congratz for finishing
vivzkestrel 3 hours ago [-]
- could you enlighten us a bit on how to go about planning a 3d game from scratch without game engines?
- you seem to be the perfect person who can explain the process
mrmckizzle 19 hours ago [-]
Added it to my steam wishlist. Thanks for sharing.
djmips 14 hours ago [-]
(2016) even more important because of the age we live in now.
dead_hn_theory 16 hours ago [-]
Shit man... Collada? Now there's a name I haven't heard in forever. I still have fond memories of Ogre3D and Sauerbraten (Cube).
KolmogorovComp 20 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of CubeWorld, if my memory serves me. And that’s a compliment!
chrysoprace 19 hours ago [-]
If you liked the look of Cube World but not what it became, you might enjoy Veloren[0], which is a free GPLv3 effort to build a game inspired by Cube World.
reading stories like this in the days of AI is amazing. Thanks for sharing, you’re and inspiration.
0x23alfonso 23 hours ago [-]
appreciate the aesthetic, hopefully it becomes fully fledged
denghongcai 43 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
windyan 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
sabujp 22 hours ago [-]
Excellent work, also when you say by hand do you mean you had some autocomplete that autocompleted or showed you inline docs for method calls or did you actually write it by hand with no autocomplete at all?
ideasphere 20 hours ago [-]
I used autocomplete but i thought that was cheating so i handwrote all my programs on napkins, scanned them in and used tesseract to digitise it, but that felt like cheating so I manually traced my scans in mspaint and then wrote my own ocr to convert them, but that felt like cheating so…
Rendered at 17:56:49 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Thought I'd share it! With AI coding now, it feels like a relic of another era. Crazy to imagine writing 100k lines by hand today!
I think we need to keep pushing back against this idea that "now it's the AI coding era, everything gets coded with AI." Let's keep building things, especially passion projects carefully by hand and normalizing this. Lots of us are still coding without AI.
Bradbury's book is almost becoming a reality.
And yes, there will be people who have no interest in learning and just want to manage the AI to do everything for them. I remain skeptical that (manager + AI) will beat (domain expert + AI). It's possible that the relevant kinds of expertise will evolve, but I'm betting on some form of expertise remaining relevant for a long time.
Historically engineers and artists were two different kinds of people, often making fun of each other, especially the former of the latter because of the "starving artist" meme.
But what I've realised since is that engineers are now realising that we were artists all along.
And now there's a division in our ranks, those who use tools to get the job done and those who enjoy the process of writing all their code by hand, aka their art.
I can appreciate both, but I'm not going to pretend that I'd waste time in a business environment doing the latter when I should be doing the former. My friend only wants to do the latter and said he'd change careers if it gets too bad.
What is the product made of? Code. If it's dogshit code, it's a dogshit product. So too with every "one-shot" 3D game Codex might spit out for you. It can make something that appears impressive the first time you look at it, but that nobody would ever play for more than 5 minutes because the facade falls over the moment it comes into contact with reality.
I really appreciate the amount of effort and skill put on this, because I tried many times to get into the 3D gaming programming and OpenGL and I found it far from my skills and patience.
Is a truly piece of art, made with passion for programming, thanks for that!
I feel like half of all software devs started out like this - coding their own game.
Crazy to imagine that no one will build their mental muscle like this anymore.
I sure learnt so much analytical thinking, debugging, problem solving and banging my head against a mental wall until the wall yielded through passion hobby projects like this. Wouldn't have been the same just saying "Claude, make [insert game here]".
I think this trope is greatly exaggerated. I'm sure a lot of people try that (and then quickly move on to whatever meme is next), but why is it often presented as the only thing people do with AI?
AI has changed the baselines, but building stuff is still going to be driven by a effort -> outcomes function. And effort leads to learning. I wrote machine code bytes by hand in the 80s, and in the 90s I already lamented that kids these days lo longer knew how things really work... but kids with interest and curiosity were actually just as fine as always.
We're very much still in the same era as back then. I hope every dev realizes by now that there's no meaningful difference between a git clone back then and using LLMs now.
Projects like yours contributed to the source "training data". It's only plagiarism when people didn't publish their source with this intent.
The one shot results vary in quality because in order for the result to align with something good, you're playing a guessing game which description(s) match the desired output. Needing to know what's on both sides of the curtain is in some ways potentially double the effort of not bothering with an LLM in the first place.
It's also for this reason I'm skeptical of the more "specialized" models. They're basically inflatable bumpers on the bowling lanes mapping to limited outputs that might not even be as good as the training source. Might as well just give me the github link at that point and we're right back to copypasta in the 2010s.
There is a difference between running a command to copy someone else's entire project (which you might then do whatever with, including manually building on top of or copying things from), and running a prompt to generate a new project (which you're then going to consider "your own").
Um… conscious intent? History? Integrity? Attribution?
> It's only plagiarism when people didn't publish their source with this intent.
Yes. And they didn’t. Unless they were public domain (which most libre projects chose not to be), they absolutely didn’t and I can’t begin to imagine how you arrived at your conclusion.
Side note: it's interesting to see how 'wrote from scratch' or 'hand written' is used in 2026. I've seen it used to mean literally everything, while others might mean they wrote the core of the engine + some SDL sprinkled throughout. And now, it could just mean 'didn't use AI at all'.
my mind is still stuck in an era where "written from scratch" means no packages and pure language.
people older than me scoff at the concept of how easy it is to be given an already working compiler..
'computers' probably have one of the most diverse fanbases as far as age and expectation goes of nearly anything around, and we're definitely entering a new era.
- you seem to be the perfect person who can explain the process
[0] https://veloren.net/