u/Happy_Variety5405

playable demo: vector3d: arena

Playable in browser (Chrome/Edge, WebGPU): https://chainsawqueen1.itch.io/vector3d-arena

This started as "let's design a 3D engine that renders like old vector graphics" with one reference screenshot attached. Three days later there's a custom engine (hidden-line rendering, a binary model format, a glTF converter, bloom, a hand-designed vector font), and an arena wave-shooter. Everything — engine, game, assets pipeline, was built in an ongoing session with Claude, with me as director/playtester. Some things I think are worth discussing:

The AI's first move was analysis It looked at my reference image and pointed out the look isn't actually wireframe — walls and leaves are black-filled surfaces that occlude lines behind them, which old vector games couldn't afford to do. That one observation (depth-only pass + biased occluders + depth-tested line pass) became the entire renderer architecture. It wrote a design doc with milestones before touching code, then we shipped milestone by milestone.

It could see its own work, and that changed everything. In milestone 0 it added a headless --screenshot flag specifically so it could render frames and look at them. The loop became: write code → render → read the image → fix → re-render. At one point it zoomed 3× into a grazing-angle shot chasing what looked like z-fighting artifacts — then worked out the "artifacts" were the cube's far pillars seen exactly end-on, i.e. geometrically correct, and shipped the depth-bias constants unchanged.

Training data cutoffs are real and it handled that honestly. wgpu had jumped several breaking versions past what it knew. Instead of hallucinating APIs it grepped the actual crate source in ~/.cargo/registry, learned the new signatures (surface acquisition became an enum, present moved to the queue...), and kept notes so it never re-derived them. Same honesty with the HUD font: it declined to reproduce Hershey font data from memory ("I'd hallucinate glyph tables") and instead hand-designed an original angular font on a 4×6 grid, Asteroids-style.

u/Happy_Variety5405 — 2 months ago
▲ 60 r/aigamedev+1 crossposts

used fable to create a 3d vector style game engine and demo

I always loved early 3d style graphics so i had fable make me an engine that supports to natively,

Details: engine has a 3d model to vector converter so any 3d model can be used, the actual arena shooter demo was made with opus using the engine.

gun model is beretta m9 i found for free and converted using the engine tools

u/Happy_Variety5405 — 2 months ago