zebleck

In just two weeks! Tiny RTS is now playable. A browser RTS with real-time multiplayer, community maps, and instant play. No download or install required. Check it out: tiny-rts.com If anything breaks, let me know, I'll fix it fast! #indiedev #gamedev #rts #webgame

Love the little things you can do with web-gamedev. Want other people to join your lobby at an event? Create the lobby and let them scan the QR code. Full RTS experience, instantly joinable, no install or download required. #gamedev #rts

A joke about vibecoding could be made here I think.. but it's mostly due to me testing in production. Oops..

Turns out "replay mode" was so powerful it tried to replay the entire server back into itself and exploded. Fix is in, matches should be stable again! Sorry for the inconvenience.

@GrinGalet I've been playing at gamedev for over 10 years and LLMs and Agents are an absolute godsend. Always make sure to plan the architecture, let the agent explore, then execute.

Hey! I’ve been following your work and really love tiny rts, it looks and feels dope ! I was a huge SC2 player so there is a special plage in my heart for rts. I'm currently diving into the vibecoding world myself with a 2D hexagonal map project (inspired by Townsfolk, mobile app and soon on steam). Since you’ve already navigated the transition from simple logic to a polished game, I’d love your take on the 'vibecoding stack.' For a pixel art game like this, do you find specific engines or AI art workflows play nicer with the LLM-first approach? Any tips from your own journey would be huge

Plan the architecture of your vibecoded games thorougly from the start, it will compound a LOT. Because TinyRTS was already a deterministic simulation, we were able to implement a memory-efficient replay system in one shot! Keep in mind this is all running in the browser.🤯

@GrinGalet As for engines, the need for engines for 2D games has gone way down, in fact no engine makes it very easy for the LLM to interface with the game if its just pure code. In my case im just using HTML with Webgl rendering, CSS, and node js for the code.

@GrinGalet Thank you! Very nice to hear youre starting your own vibecoding arc, would love to see the progress. Sadly I havent found a good 2D AI Art workflow yet, so for me the breakthrough was realizing to go all in on human asset packs.

@mrtonyy_ @PixelFrogStudio Hey man, glad to hear it's helping you. I agree, its amazing to already have beautiful art! I also use it to answer myself what to implement. @PixelFrogStudio already had a very nice vision/scope of an RTS with this pack.

@zebleckAI tinyswords art pack @PixelFrogStudio is such a gift. i'm using it to learn unity game development, and it's so nice to have a well made asset pack to work with, so i can focus on the code. looks awesome! good work!

@JakeSmGaming Nah just the replay system lol, the game was not one-shot.

@zebleckAI Browser RTS with replay in one shot? That's the architecture win we all dream of. Planning really does compound.

@paulsputer It's very simple, you got the gist of it, storing only commands and the tick in which they were sent. You just seed the initial state and then run the tick-based simulation and apply commands at the same time they were applied in the game. Leads to the exact same behavior.

@zebleckAI That's neat, is that in like a sparse 2nd differential form that's stored only when there's a command or interrupt and then can linearly interpolate position action from that?

@isagawa_co Initially just HTML5 Canvas with node js. Now moved the rendering to webgl, postgres for db, redis for dynamic fast storage. Websockets for multiplayer. Definitely try it! A looot is possible these days.

@zebleckAI Nice. I definitely plan on getting into game dev. What stack is this? Three.js?

It's been an absolute blast to watch new players try out the game against the AI opponents over the last few days. Thanks to everyone who tried it out! Here you can see the classic moment before chaos, as the AI army approaches an unsuspecting player. #indiedev #rts #gamedev

@illegal_memer Yoo that 5th River map looks awesome, thanks a lot!

@zebleckAI checking this out rn seems really cool!

@bukati Thank you very much!

@zebleckAI Mine is xfinity, you can report a mistake here - spa.xfinity.com/report

@bukati Wow I fixed that issue weeks ago for the Chrome Browser Warning. Do you know which one?

@zebleckAI heads up, the domain is marked as malware for some ISPs

@TinyTeamsDev tiny-teams.com 🤣 nice one. i guess were in a tiny club?

@zebleckAI Pretty awesome domain name too. Great work fellow 'Tiny' game developer

If you want to be notified of upcoming events or find some human players to play against, there are usually some online on the discord, feel free to join: discord.gg/bkbzF57cF9

The hits: Batched 2000 GPU uploads into 1, replaced 16K water tiles with a single repeating quad, throttled fog rendering, cached the minimap, and fixed 85ms zoom spikes. Biggest lesson: measure first. I assumed post-processing was the bottleneck. Added a toggle. It added 0 FPS.

Spent today optimizing the TinyRTS renderer for large 128x128 maps 10-15 → 70 FPS (player) 10-15 → 144 FPS (spectator) Using Opus 4.6, we found and fixed about a dozen inefficiencies🤯 #gamedev #webgl #indiedev #rts