alt Hacker NewsWk. 6 of Vibecoding an MMO
Comments
I'd like to see a vibe coded re-implementation of progress quest:
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!
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.
Is it really massively multiplayer? There are 7 players online.
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.
It's smooth in Chrome but its buggy and unplayable in Firefox :( but fun!
Honestly it's pretty cool besides the obviously Claude-written dialogue and tooltip text. That shit is so grating and makes my skin crawl.
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!
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.
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.