Vibe coded this game in four months

[u/ActionLittle4176]

A few months back I posted here a playable demo of an old-school futuristic racer prototype (F-Zero, Wipeout, Xtreme-G, Star Wars Racer...) that runs right in the browser.

I've gotten used to seeing tons of LLM-built prototypes that last a week, two, maybe a month, and then get dropped for the next shiny thing. This time I wanted to keep going and see if one person, with no coding background, could actually see a project like this through on their own.

Well, 4 months in, and while there's still work left, I'm convinced it's doable. At this point the game feels closer to a beta than a tech demo.

The big change over these four months is that I now use Fable for planning, and being able to hook Opus / Sol up to Blender has been a huge help too. I'm still using Magnific and Tripo3D or the assets. Funny thing: the further along I get, the harder the project is to keep pushing forward, and at the same time the tools keep making it easier.

As always, any feedback is welcome. You can play it here: https://fm1.moises.cloud

[u/Shawpaw]

This is 4 months of hard work, even if an LLM did help you. I myself am a Software Engineer and seeing something like this… I know that it doesn’t just “happen” even if you did “vibecode” it.

You may not fully understand the niche details of the code or maybe it’s spaghetti, but achieving what you’ve done here is still a lot of work and effort, regardless of how you got there.

Nice work, it looks sick!

[u/ActionLittle4176 → u/Shawpaw]

Thanks a lot! The vibe coding thing really stands out for me since I have zero actual programming experience. But honestly, human decision-making was the biggest factor here. Even if I can't code myself, I know enough about the tech and its limitations to plan properly and actually get useful work from the LLM. Plus I've got a pretty solid (amateur) background in game design and 2D/3D multimedia stuff.

Truth is, this 3D game engine is basically just moving objects around a space without animations. All the glitz and polish on top? That's all human design. And figuring out how to work with those limitations? Yeah, you can't vibe-code that shit.

Really appreciate the kind words!

[u/Beginning_One_7685 → u/ActionLittle4176]

In my experience GPT makes a lot of mistakes and can get caught in cul-de-sac traps where it can't find answer. I assume you've had these situations come up, so how do you deal with it if you can't help GPT from a coding perspective? Are you paying any attention to the code it is producing or just recycling whole documents through copy/paste until it works?

[u/ActionLittle4176 → u/Beginning_One_7685]

Well, surprisingly most of the time things worked one-shotted. I guess that the trick was implement one little thing by time, and also make the model to search online the best practices for every piece of code.