Part 1 was a couple weeks back if you missed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1s8w5ib/i_vibecoded_a_full_wc2_inspired_rts_game_with/
I spent a couple of days this weekend turning the 2D WC2-style RTS into a 3D WC3-style game. Still very much WIP but it's playable now in both modes. Hit the 'O' hotkey in-game to toggle between classic 2D and the new 3D mode at any time. You can play it in your browser here: https://shardsofstone.com/
Quick gallery of all the building models across every faction here:
https://www.shardsofstone.com/buildings-preview.html?optimized=1
What's done:
- All 268 buildings generated in 3D (across 9 factions, around 296 building defs total counting walls, paths, and torches that stay procedural). Generated with meshy.ai.
- Spent about £50 on meshy so far for the buildings. Units will probably be another £50 to £100.
- Units are more manual than buildings. Meshy's UI is better than the API for rigging and animations, and there are more misses, so I lean on the free retries the UI gives you.
- Rat faction has all units done in 3D. Some siege, flying, and naval units are done for other factions too. Rest is still 2D for now.
- Animation sprite sheet pipeline. I bake the 3D models down into 2D animation sprite sheets so the 2D mode also gets proper unit animations out of this. Two birds, one stone.
- Optimisation pipeline for GLBs, same idea as the 2D sprite optimisation. Web-ready models that let you run hundreds of units and buildings in the browser and still get reasonable FPS. Your mileage may vary, only tested on my machine.
- Buildings animate as they're being built, visually showing construction progress instead of just a progress bar.
- Buildings shatter into shards when destroyed and leave rubble behind.
- Shadows match the day/night cycle clock.
- Graphics options in the settings menu so you can dial it down if your hardware hates you.
- Toggle the 'O' key in-game to switch from 2D to 3D.
- 3D Model Viewer in the Extras menu. Browse every unit and building model, spin them around, inspect animations. Desktop only.
Desktop vs mobile:
The 3D experience is desktop only for now. Loading every model and unit at once needs roughly 3 to 4GB of RAM, which is more than most phones can comfortably hand a browser tab. Mobile users automatically get the 2D experience. Honestly I'm saving you the bandwidth and the thermal throttling. The 2D mode is still the full game with all the new baked unit animations from the sprite sheet pipeline. Claude came up with the baking pipeline to turn the unit 3D models and animations into 2D sprite sheets for the 8 directions a unit can face.
Known issues:
- Some unit animations are mislabelled and play the wrong action (e.g. attack instead of walk, death instead of idle etc..)
- Some units are facing the wrong direction. Need to run a batch rotation fix pass with a manual review.
- There are almost certainly more issues and bugs I haven't found yet.
On meshy: generates quickly. Quality is hit or miss but it's a fantastic way to prototype and you can iterate fast. The 3D GLB files have to go through an optimisation pipeline to make them web-ready (same as I did with the 2D sprites to keep the download size sane). Just had Claude write a script and it used the 2D nano banana sprites via the meshy API.
Transparency / affiliate bit: if you want to support my meshy usage and try meshy.ai out for yourself, here's my affiliate link: https://www.meshy.ai/?utm_source=meshy&utm_medium=referral-program&utm_content=GSVL4L
You get 30 days of Pro for $1, plus 50% off for the next 2 months. Capped at 3 referrals on my end ($60 of meshy credits total) - this would go a long way for me to generate more models for the 3D units!