Lessons from Building a Game Engine from Scratch in Gleam
summary
Built-from-scratch browser game engine written in Gleam that compiles to Javascript for the client and Erlang on the BEAM for the server, currently running but still in progress; implements requestAnimationFrame with fixed-update, variable-render semantics, uses an accumulator and max-loop guard to avoid dropped frames and death spirals, and demonstrates recursive frame-consuming updates; leverages LLMs for rapid domain exploration, naming, and system design and reports practical performance numbers from those experiments.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Why build a game engine
- 2:46Why Gleam beats TypeScript
- 5:11Two key lessons
- 6:56Hidden complexity in game loop
- 16:47AI accelerates learning
- 19:16Ambitious projects change careers
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