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Hi HN — I built a browser-based tool for creating and sharing third-person action-adventure games!

Game creation is AI-assisted, but the result is still represented as editable game objects, mechanics, and scripts. The goal is to make iteration more understandable and controllable than vibe coding an entire game.

Compared with engines like Unreal, the game maker is intentionally narrow: it focuses on a set of common game mechanics, which makes it much faster to learn and use.

I recommend starting with the demo game. You can play a 5 minute mission immediately, or open it in the editor without creating an account. Both options are available from the front page.

The engine runs in the browser using WebGPU and is written in C++ via Emscripten. All humanoid animations are generated in real time with the help of a physics simulation (Jolt).

Longer term, I’d like to use neural rendering to translate the games’ "semantic pixels" into arbitrary visual styles. Near-term features include music, more varied sound, and a unified agent interface. Currently, behavior creation is split between objects and scripts rather than handled through a single iterative workflow.

There is also a free trial for creating your own game.

Let me know about your thoughts :) It's still early but most fundamental mechanics and features are in place.

Known issue: the current version may crash on iOS 26, fixed on iOS 27. The game can be played on touch/mobile, but the editor designed to be desktop-only.

Thanks for taking a look!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49128617

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Hi HN!

This is an early proof of concept of a branchable, versioned OLTP + OLAP database that runs on a single, open copy of your data in object storage. If you are familiar with Databricks' LTAP (https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/d...) announcement from June, you can think of this as aspiring to be a fully open source, Apache 2.0 LTAP alternative with additional data versioning/auditability guarantees that enable audit, as_of queries, and (eventually) revert straight out of the box.

How it works:

1. Writes land in vanilla postgres which functions as an ephemeral hot tier

2. A background pass flushes committed rows out to columnar files in an object storage cold tier

3. A DataFusion based query engine merges results across the two tiers (with some fancy caching and indexing)

For a deep dive on the architecture/intended design/vision see: https://penca.io/blog/the-penca-architecture.html.

This project is very, very early on. It is mostly a PoC right now and there are many bugs and shortcomings with many major items still on the roadmap. I hope to get some real performance numbers soon.

A few features I would like to add in no particular order:

- Iceberg export

- Branching (from any branch, not just main)

- Improved SQL support (e.g. multi-statement execution)

- Full-text search and vector indexes

- Configurable isolation levels (currently last write wins)

- A pgwire frontend

Any and all feedback is appreciated. I'd also like help! If any of this appeals to you and the project doesn't seem like the craziest idea of all time, shoot me an email at nico@penca.io.

Disclaimer: before someone comments this, yes, the code is heavily AI generated. I have tried to leave as much of the dev tooling in the repo as possible to demonstrate what the end-to-end development workflow looks like. Also, the majority of the commit history is missing as I had to rename/migrate + scrub the repo prior to open sourcing.

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An influencer in the fitness space who has genuine distribution and proven experience scaling one app, offered me (~6 years software engineering exp. w/ one side project scaled to 15k users) the following technical cofounder offer for a fitness app requiring a custom iOS vision module:

No payment to start. MVP base rate is 10k, 5k on delivery of phase A, 2.5k on phase B and 2.5k on phase C.

After the MVP is delivered, if we both want to move forward, then the 10k would turn into 2% equity vesting immediately, and 23% would vest over the next 3 years. When continuing as cofounders, he would then offer a 100k/year salary. If we do not continue as cofounders, I walk away with 10k and he gets the IP.

To me this sounds like he doesn't respect my time, I estimated the MVP build at 300h. It comes off as "I want you to go through a 4 month job interview in order to become a technical cofounder with me". The only thing that stands out is that I could also just build the MVP and do the bare minimum to maintain it after delivery while collecting the salary. Has anyone ever accepted a deal like this and found it worthwhile?

My worry is that I'm hung out to dry if he drops the project after the MVP delivery. Any recommendations on counter offers?

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Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/man-invested-45m-in-a-nicolas-cage-movie-it-got-stolen-off-netflixs-desk/

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Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/technology/personaltech/apple-siri-ai-prompts.html

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Article URL: https://flueframework.com/blog/flue-2/

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Article URL: https://abc7.com/post/campus-guardian-angel-drones-american-schools-install-pepper-spraying-mithril-defense-stop-active-school-shooters/19595678/

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Article URL: https://leetcopilot.dev/blog/how-to-spot-overlapping-subproblems-before-writing-dp

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Article URL: https://blog.railway.com/p/how-to-make-viral-commercial

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