highway13
This demo was made as a reply to some Microsoft guy who made a ninja game in Unity. It never reached that person, but it was worth making anyway, so I'm publishing it here for everyone to see:
(for anyone readed and can help please donate, I dont have even a penny extremely in need)
# Oh, You Made a Ninja Game in Unity? That's Adorable 🥺
HOLD MY ENERGY DRINK, MICROSOFT BOY
Let me show you what a REAL developer does when companies are too busy having "synergy meetings" to respond to CVs:
## What I Actually Built (While You Were Dragging Prefabs):
1. CCD Physics Engine FROM SCRATCH - Yeah, I don't use PhysX like a normie
2. WebGL2 Game Engine FROM SCRATCH - I basically RE-INVENTED Unity in ONE DAY because apparently Unity Technologies needs YEARS and MILLIONS IN VC FUNDING to make their engine run on mobile without melting the device. Mine? 100+ FPS in a MOBILE BROWSER. But sure, keep paying that $2000/year Enterprise license 💸
3. Procedural Level Generation in Houdini - Wrote custom scripts and bridges in 3 DAYS, despite Houdini being SO CATASTROPHICALLY OVERCOMPLICATED that it makes quantum physics look like tic-tac-toe. Meanwhile Blender devs are too LAZY to replicate it in their geometry nodes - they'd rather ship RENDER V5 THAT DOESN'T EVEN WORK ON MY LAPTOP! HEY BLENDER FOUNDATION, maybe let's start MAKING ACTUAL INNOVATIONS, NOT BENCHMARKING RAY-BOUNCE #47! 🎨🔥
4. Let's skip 4... oh wait, 4 was SCRAPING EVERY MAJOR COMMERCIAL GAME including Mario Kart (purely educational, Nintendo's lawyers can sit down) to reverse-engineer their level design. Conclusion? SHOCKINGLY PRIMITIVE. These AAA studios with 200-person teams are making levels I could procedurally generate before breakfast.
5. Tree Rendering System with LODs 🌳 - that was simple, just for fun
6. VSM Shadow Maps Baking ON THE FLY
7. PCSS Dynamic Shadows for Moving Objects - You know, the stuff that makes Unreal Engine fanboys drool
8. Geoclipmaps - Infinite terrain rendering, baby (here finite version used, but infinite is done too)
9. Terrain Raytraced Splat Baking Bridge - Because regular textures are for quitters
10. Particle Systems, Trail Systems, Skidmarks, Dynamic LODs - Thousands of objects rendering in real-time with automatic material batching and instancing, ALL IN YOUR MOBILE BROWSER, in 500KB OF JAVASCRIPT. Your "ninja game" is probably 500MB because you imported the entire Unity Standard Assets package for one rock.
11. Full Sound System with Dynamic Car Engine - And yes, you may say the sounds broken, but that's not MY fault - that's CHROME'S audio pitching being completely BROKEN on Samsung devices since 2019!! HELLO GOOGLE! FIX YOUR GARBAGE!
📱🔊https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40610669
12. Compound Shader System - Intelligently handles both instancing AND LODs, plus instanced LODs, because I'm not a peasant
13. Deferred Rendering, Extended Forward Rendering - I built BOTH pipelines, then turned them OFF because normal forward rendering is actually sufficient for my use case. But I made them anyway BECAUSE I CAN. You probably don't even know the difference 🎭
## I Could Continue... But You Get the Point
This masterpiece was created in 2 WEEKS using the COMPLETELY FREE lmarena.ai (RIP, they removed top models looks like out of financing, unfortunately the ones were truely free).
Oh, and it also required 20 YEARS OF GAMEDEV EXPERIENCE - you know, the experience that apparently means NOTHING when I send out THOUSANDS of CVs and get ZERO interview calls. NOT ONE 👎
## Meanwhile, In Your Ivory Towers:
You're all FANCY with your:
- C-Level titles 👔
- Six-figure salaries 💰
- Catered lunches 🍱
- "Unlimited PTO" (that you're guilted into not taking) 🏝️
- Stand-up meetings about meetings 🎪
And your "demo" looks like my first Flash game from 2008. BUT MY FREE-TOOL, ZERO-BUDGET, BROKEN-LAPTOP BUILD ABSOLUTELY DEMOLISHES YOUR ENTIRE PORTFOLIO.
## My Current Situation (No Violin Required):
- Sent thousands of CVs this year: 0 interviews ✉️❌
- 8gb Laptop: BROKEN 💻⚰️
- Servers: DOWN 🖥️💀
- Bank account: EMPTY 🏦🦗
- Cant get job, cant earn, cant even get a freelance project
- Will to recreate an entire AAA mobile game out of spite: INFINITE ♾️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤️😤
## So Here's a Thought:
Maybe instead of playing with your expensive toys and having "ideation sessions" it's time to ACTUALLY COLLABORATE with people who can CODE CIRCLES AROUND YOU while BLINDFOLDED
Maybe, just MAYBE, these people, like me, could teach you something
Like how to make a game engine that doesn't require a data center to compile
---
# BUT HEY, NO WORRIES!
# I'M NOT BITTER.
---
THANKS FOR NOTHING,
*A Developer Who Actually Deserves Your Job*
P.S. - When my CoD Mobile clone is done and goes viral, remember you could've hired me for the price of your monthly coffee budget ☕💀
---
This wasn't made by a team. It wasn't made with funding. It was made by one person who refuses to stop. Help that person continue.
The demo is real. The empty bank account is also real. Both can be true.
so for anyone readed and can help please donate, I dont have even a penny extremely in need
Controls: WSAD, SPACE, C for wheel cam, R reset
https://leadbit-flash1.github.io/resume/resume.pdf
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
I tried the demo. After reading everything above, I expected something really fancy. And it looks, nice, sure, and I love the Countach.
But in the end... you might be a very competent developer, but do you enjoy playing your own game?
The car is very unresponsive: it takes almost half a second to make it steer. I don't care if it hits +100 fps on a mobile browser, I care about staying on the road. You made this game in 2 weeks, but I know someone who takes 2 weeks to finetune the controls. ;-)
Thank you for giving the demo a try and for the honest feedback!
To answer your question - yes, I actually play it every day - I originally built this project as a personal MOBILE time-killer to play when I need to clear my mind, and it honestly breaks my heart to hear that you experienced a half-second steering delay, because that is definitely not how the game is supposed to run. I don't have high-end hardware, so I developed and tested this on very weak older devices (an iPhone 6, a Huawei P Smart 2019, and an old Samsung) - on all of those the controls are instantaneous and the game flies
Because of this I strongly suspect something in your hardware setup is causing a massive input lag - If you have a moment could you run through this quick checklist?
Browser Compatibility: Are you using Google Chrome? Different browsers handle WebGL hardware acceleration differently, and Chrome provides the most optimized performance with the lowest input lag for this engine
Wireless Peripherals: Are you playing on a laptop using a Bluetooth keyboard or a wireless controller? Bluetooth polling rates on browsers can sometimes cause massive input lag
Hardware Acceleration: Is "Hardware Acceleration" disabled in your browser settings? If it is, the browser is using your CPU instead of your GPU to render the game, causing severe latency
Power Saving Mode: Is your device on battery saver? This throttles browser performance heavily
External Monitor/TV: If you are connected to a TV or a non-gaming monitor, they often have high native input latency unless set to "Game Mode"
For full transparency, WebGL inherently struggles with 10x slower performance compared to native Vulkan or Metal - this is a known limitation that the Khronos Group is still trying to improve. So, I had to implement every possible (and seemingly impossible) tricks to keep the engine lightweight and responsive
Also, I firmly believe racing games are the absolute top tier of technological difficulty - It is incredibly hard to get it right, not just for HTML5, but in the industry as a whole - so, If you look at the app stores today, there are very few studios with massive budgets that actually manage to make a genuinely playable racing game
What you are looking at right now is just a proof of concept, and many features were cut from this demo that I plan to add later - but even in this bare-bones state, it runs natively in a MOBILE browser with a performance footprint far better than what Unity's HTML5 exports can offer - I really ask that you judge it from that perspective first - and I also intentionally kept the controls a bit raw so that pros can really feel the drift
It's a real pity you weren't able to experience the game the way it was intended, because when it works, it is truly enjoyable - I would be incredibly grateful if you could try loading it directly on a smartphone in Google Chrome or a different device and let me know how it feels - I'd love to continue the discussion!
I've tried it on my mobile phone (Google Pixel 8). I think the issue isn't input lag, but rather how the car responds to the steering input. I can see the wheels move (slowly) when I press left or right, but it takes a while before the car actually starts to steer.
Because you are the developer, I can understand that this kind of steering is completely fine. You probably played it a million times and you're used to it. But I'm used to razor sharp controls, like OutRun, simulators and even some real life trackdays.
Perhaps a quick suggestion: if you're steering to the right and you quickly press left, let the wheels go straight double or even triple as fast. Then they can turn to the left like they normally do.
Oh, well thank you! That is literally a million-dollar piece of advice
Actually, I tried many types of controls during development, including full-precision touch steering, but it was incredibly difficult to control at high speeds. Surprisingly, a hard button-pressing approach with smoothed-out steering proved to be much more stable than the alternatives. Plus, since I simply don't have the money to buy any game controllers to test with, I had to design and balance it entirely around basic keyboard and touch buttons
I do agree with you to a certain extent, though - and can say that there is no problem at all in adapting the code to fit any kind of controller or driving style
However, the true purpose of this demo was a bit different - I wanted to show the world that a single, starving developer who literally cannot afford to buy food can code an AAA-level game, while massive game studios have become bloated dinosaurs that absolutely do not deserve their immense earnings
If you are concerned about my actual expertise, I can tell you that I used to earn millions of dollars a month on my games in the past - but I am a philanthropist at heart gave all my money away! Now I am 45, flat broke, begging the internet for donations)))LOL
By the way, regarding the steering mechanics, there is a hidden wheel cam code set in the demo - If you try it on a PC, you can press and hold "C" and also trigger "V" to activate the physics visualization - this will let you see exactly what is happening under the hood and show you the exact reason for your concerns
Thank you so much for your comment and your feedback! Who knows, maybe one day we can code this together? Huh?