Yet another Hacker News

Hedra is a 3D open world game I wrote from scratch while in highschool

62 points maxilevi 2 hours ago 14 comments

maxilevi 2 hours ago | parent

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!

jh3nd3rs0n 1 hour ago | parent

Thanks for sharing. It's nice to see a game made without AI.

sublinear 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

sublinear 1 hour ago | parent

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 45 minutes ago | parent

> 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").

dachris 1 hour ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

adamddev1 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

wellidisagree 40 minutes ago | parent

I disagree. It very much looks like AI. In fact, this is close to something a good model will few- or even one-shot.

I don’t like to say it. I am not proud of it but I like to be rational. We are outgunned and we are not going to make it by ignoring the obvious.

The world did indeed change. My passion projects of before 2024 look like quaint relics from a distant past and they in fact are. Most of them will be one-shotted by quantized open models running locally in 20mins whereas I took weeks.

Doing things “by hand” is as much a waste of time or perhaps even more so than coding your apps in handcrafted assembly. It’s beautiful and I did it and perhaps someday, when retired probably, will do it again if at all possible but it makes absolutely zero sense to do it if you take your time seriously and are not madly in love with code itself which I suspect most are not because.. why would you. Code is not the product. The product is the product.

pjmlp 25 minutes ago | parent

Kudos for achieving it, and extra brownie points for the effort to go with C# instead the more common options.

skyberrys 2 hours ago | parent

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.

0x23alfonso 2 hours ago | parent

appreciate the aesthetic, hopefully it becomes fully fledged

sabujp 47 minutes ago | parent

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?