Wk. 6 of Vibecoding an MMO | Hacker News Reader

Wk. 6 of Vibecoding an MMO

eldermyr.com

14 pointsjosiahturnq47 comments

I really enjoyed myself for 5 minutes, which is more than I can say for 100 games in my steam lib. For some reason my screen is shaking a lot when I play and it hurts my eyes. Would also recommend talking to show above the head in bold text to encourage social interaction, so easy to miss the chat box.

Yeah this was a new find for me as well. I've never had enough players for this to become obvious, but I think every player's ultimate is causing every other player's screen to shake... new find, but really annoying. Queueing it up.

fixed!

Chat tab has been added so it's not so easy to miss chats now.

added the overhead chat display as well!

I learned coding on private MMO emulators (lineage 2 primarily). I had my own private server I was building in my spare time, implementing all the needed server features for the client one by one. Packet sniffing to know what any of the messages even meant. I was in the middle of that when I was approached by my business partner to do my first startup, and I haven't touched it since (2014).

It'd be a whole lot easier to get that done (and adapted to another client) now if I pulled that code back out.

Edit: After playing for a few min, not too bad! One thing I did notice, is the netcode/movement feels a little bit janky. I had jitter and ghosting on other players and NPCs.

Cool project!

Apologies for anyone that got kicked -- I wasn't ready for the 300 players in 1hr. It does indeed scale with player usage, but wasn't quite ready for 35 players at a time!

Honestly, combat & movement feel pretty good and and it's very comparable to what a normal engineer would put together after 6 weeks. The hard part, when making games at least, is figuing out what makes things fun and (more specifically when it comes to RPGs) how to do the scaling. Both of these are pretty hard and require a ton of experimentation.

Since it's vibe-coded, I was really hoping to see some AI-generated storylines (turn `go to <x,y> and do z` into a fun quest) and more worldbuilding. AI is surprisingly good at generating passable prose, certainly comparable to a middle-of-the-road RPG.

Yeah, I vibe-coded an iOS game last year. While I'd had the gameplay idea for years, it took so much time balancing everything and I still didn't really get it quite right.

Yeah making game mechanics is the easy part. A game that's actually fun is much harder and I'm struggling with that.

Just ask Claude to "make it fun."

good idea

I'd like to see a vibe coded re-implementation of progress quest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest

Is it really massively multiplayer? There are 7 players online.

I believe the "massively" part of "massively multiplayer online game" means all the players are in the same world, unlike other multiplayer games where you might join a match with a group of players.

With 6 weeks in, we're working on the massive part lol.

It's smooth in Chrome but its buggy and unplayable in Firefox :( but fun!

bummer! Just did a performance optimization but haven't tested in firefox. I'll look into it.

Why promote this as being vibecoded? There are so many good games out there, why would one choose to spend a moment playing one that the creator of implies is half-assed by how they talk about it? If the game is good and you're proud of it, why not promote it rather than your means of creating it? We are all responsible for our own work at the end of the day, whether we code it ourselves or use AI agents. Emphasizing that it has only been done by AI is not very enticing.

Probely because that is the entirety of it. There is zero story or creativity or anything else that goes into an actual game, virtually nothing is named and any that has is a simply word or two jammed together into a name -- the player guide is written in claudish and has a literal table of the number of roads.

I don't think this is so much a game as a figure out how much can be vibecoded, such a tech demo rather of an engine

You can see immediately that it's vibecoded so they kind of don't have a choice but to say so. It is interesting to see what can be achieved with AI even if few people want to play 100% vibecoded games.

Frankly nobody will click into something that is just a game after 6 weeks. It's extremely unlikely to be interesting. 6 weeks of vibecoding brings the AI hype, and sets a truer expectation of substantial progress.

Plus all the AI guys are intrigued. I would be, as one of them.

I think it's because people want to see what kind of a train wreck it is by being entirely vibe coded. It's a novelty. And to see what parts might be working normally or have clear heritage from existing RPGs.

Do you also question why photographers list which lens they used to take a photo?

Look I get it, half of us actively hate anything produced by AI. Just like half of photographers hated anything taken by digital cameras

But there is a limited time window before the "I hate this" voice becomes a pedantic minority one. If the rate of AI progress doesn't show you a clear picture of what's coming, maybe it's time to reflect on that.

What is it about AI that causes so many of its promoters to write like a used car salesman using hard sell tactics to push a lemon onto an unsuspecting mark? Raises my hackles every time I see it.

Even those who are pro-AI ought to discourage this; these people make you look bad.

Interesting comment but frankly I'm speaking as someone who has no idea how to market, not as an AI salesman. Valid concern, but sounds like confirmation bias.

Unless you are the same person as account "elif", I wasn't responding to you?

Ah my bad, thought this was an open forum!

if you can't answer the questions i'm asking there's probably a reason for it.

And i'm not the reason.

GTA 6 doesn't stand a chance

we're coming for you, Rockstar

Would love feedback!

Feels appropriate to ask an AI for that, no? You're vibing it, so the feedback would be vibed too…

(and at that point why not ask an AI yourself?)

I get it, you don't like AI haha

Started a game and was immediately attacked by a group of spherical green blobs, making it more akin to an action game than an RPG. Maybe put the new user in some kind of town or less hostile environment to walk around in and explore first. Take a look at the first 30-60 minutes of gameplay of something very old like Final Fantasy 1 for NES for an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_(video_game)

This is awesome feedback! I'd love more of this stuff if you have time for it. I have a discord link in the game or just chatting here (if you have the time to spare)

The setting for disabling screen shake doesnt seem to actually disable it. Its really off-putting.

the world shaking all the time has been fixed now!

The “nearby” list of players takes up half the screen on mobile (Safari) and I can’t see my player or really anything going on.

I really like the Vampire Survivors vibe though and what I think might have been other players running around under my UI was really neat.

Didn't realize this, that's a massive problem haha. Thanks for the note!

Honestly it's pretty cool besides the obviously Claude-written dialogue and tooltip text. That shit is so grating and makes my skin crawl.

Fair callouts

Still no storyline. Just random action and attacks.

Why am I being attacked?

Where am I going and why?

Donkey Kong: the princess has been kidnapped by a monkey.

I am going to rescue the princess.

Simple as that my man.

There is a storyline with the legion, but generally most users aren't motivated by that. I certainly am not in any games I played growing up.

Noted tho that there are users here for the plot. So a plot they will get!

Give them a non-binding plot with endless side games?

You can rescue the princess or waste time drinking mead and gambling in the inn.

Fair. I respect that. I'll work on it!

You are trying to build an MMO and think story is irrelevant? My man! That's the core of the genre.

You come for the story and stay for the rep grind.

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