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the C engine is finally ready for prime time, it's name is Kaigen.
in the next few days I'll start posting more demos, and re-posting old demos, with playable links and intake forms for a closed beta.
if you're a professional game or 3D app developer who wants to give your users the smoothest possible experience, on *every* platform. DM me.
just finished my ECS system in C and it turns out it's ~17x faster than @unity DOTS on the web
that's 100k boids at ~90 FPS instead of 17 FPS
sharing the code and link for this demo soon, details below 🧵
“Kaigen delivers a AAA renderer, better perf (native C vs. JavaScript; check out the gameplay video and how smooth it runs) and cross-platform support
While the game took up a lot more tokens than a similar Three.js game to build, it delivered something I haven’t been able to in the same time with Three.js”
@0xRishi most likely built the most advanced game with Kaigen so far, and also wrote a very transparent take on Kaigen vs Three.js so far.
There will be many engines in the new era of AI in games, developers will have breadth of choices. Three.js continues to be the most user friendly engine out there, Kaigen was made thinking on professional game devs used to AAA engines like Unity and Unreal. My hopes is to take inspirations from both ends of the spectrum.
Kaigen will still improve a lot, we will optimize token expenditure, and continue to push AAA level performance as much as physically possible.
We’re still early.
Introducing OG Clash - the game I'm most proud of so far
OG Clash is a browser-based survival shooter where - alongside allies - you defend against waves of zombies, activate and defend 3 summoning rituals, then take down the final boss/titan: Kolgrim. You can use guns, swords, bows, upgrades, perks, builds, first- and third-person POVs, and much more
This was my first game built outside of @threejs and was (1) a test-run of the @kaigen3d C game engine by @gdechichi as well as (2) a showcase of the native and portable identities from @opengameio: OGs (more on that soon!)
I also made this whole cinematic trailer/video with Claude Code
It still blows my mind what someone who has never done game development can do with these models in just a few days… and even crazier thinking through what actual game devs/professionals can and will produce when they leverage this technology
More takeaways on Kaigen, raw gameplay footage, and how I approached making the game and trailer in thread
Play at ogclash.io (desktop and mobile)
#gamedev #indiegame
never deleting this app
aren't you the moron that exposed your API keys on stream/uploaded your .env files and lost $90,000 and cried about it on your X lol
xitter.cf/JustLingonberry/status…
you're a real dev for sure!
Bioware was the studio I dreamed to work at when I was a kid wanting to make games.
My first job in Canada was for a studio founded by former Bioware devs who worked on the classics: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, even Neverwinter Nights.
This is a sad message to read, the creative works of this company defined a generation, nothing more to way here, just a wish for better days for the games industry.
btw an *empty project* in @unity is 7.2 MEGABYTES brotli compressed
this is over 45x larger than Kaigen's Minecraft demo, except it has *zero* user facing functionality
the equivalent of Kaigen's "hello world" empty project is just 16kB
the Javascript entrypoint is larger than the entire engine when stripped.
Tolan was the first AI character app I've seen that's actually about connecting with people.
Now 250k+ people spend time with their Tolan every month, and they just raised $30M.
Proud to have played a small part in the early days of this amazing team ❤️
Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you.
Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when you’re alone with your newborn. On your commute when you’re anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet.
The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who aren’t trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations.
This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year.
Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m.
To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)
time does fly! xitter.cf/ajaymehta/status/18951…
Yesterday we announced Tolan, an Embodied Companion in the form of a cute, friendly alien character. Today, we’re sharing more about the creative process behind the design of the Tolan characters and their in-app environment, featured in a story by Jesus Diaz at @FastCompany
excellent point
People confuses Programming with Coding.
Coding to Programming is what Typing to Writing is.
~Leslie Lamport
youtube.com/watch?v=rkZzg7Vo…
when I started writing my engine, my expectation was that it would take 4 to 5 years to get it to a level where everybody could use it.
instead it took 18 months, and that's because I only even started using AI code in July, after Fable 5.
the actual core runtime of a game engine (the part that actually matters), can be written by hand by an experience programmers in a couple of months give or take.
the problem is the sheer amount of glue code you have to write to make it usable: editor code, serialization code, supporting different graphics features per platform, refactoring systems to make sure everything works together without impacting performance, the list goes on.
that kind of code is neither fun to write nor an exercise in technical thinking, and it made up 70% of the work before.
now we have automation for a big part of it. not for the thinking part imo (Fable knows every trick in the book but it seems to struggle with deciding what to do with it), but for the manual work that came after it.
this will simultaneously unlock incredible progress, and incredible disruption. programming doesn't look the same, jobs don't look the same, running a company doesn't look the same. we will have to figure out the new normal in the upcoming years.
do I miss writing code? every day. I went through rough times this year trying to come to terms with this new reality. part of me wants it back, the other part is excited about what the future will look like.
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
