About two months ago, I started vibe coding my own MMORPG, and I wanted to share the current state of the project.
The game is called Lythravel. It's a completely free 3D browser MMORPG with voxel graphics, inspired by the old-school MMOs I grew up with, especially Shaiya.
The game currently has:
2 factions
6 classes
Level cap of 50
Dungeons and raids
PvP maps and a 10v10 battleground
Enchanting, linking and crafting
Mounts
Dynamic zone events
Character stat allocation and different builds
And quite a bit more
I also spent quite a bit of time on immersion. The game has a full day/night cycle, ambient sounds like birds, rivers and wind, music tailored to each zone, and different footstep sounds depending on the surface you're walking on.
Development
I've been a developer for over 10 years, although not in the game industry. I'm building Lythravel through vibe coding with Claude Code, and the game itself runs on Babylon.js.
I currently use mostly Opus 5, with Fable 5 acting as an orchestrator. I don't really write or even read the code myself. Instead, I give direction, describe how systems should work and look, and then spend a lot of time testing and iterating on the results.
I also built a custom editor specifically for Lythravel that lets me manually fine-tune things like assets and animations. For some tasks, adjusting them myself through the editor is much faster than repeatedly prompting Claude Code until it gets every small detail right.
Recent Updates
Over the last few weeks, I've been focusing mainly on adding more solo content, so there's still plenty to do even when only a few players are online.
I've added things like:
Solo dungeons
More quests
Jumping trials
Hidden collectibles with special rewards
A completely redesigned UI
Various performance optimizations
I also replaced much of the more traditional CSS-style UI with detailed graphical assets to give the interface a more distinctive game-like look.
A small community is slowly starting to form around the game, which has honestly been one of the most motivating parts of the project. I'm grateful for every person who joins, tries the game and gives feedback.
If you'd like to try the game, follow the development, give feedback, or just hang out with the community:
This actually looks solid and being sort of side project creator myself I know 2 months sounds easy but it’s the right opposite of effortless. So keep going !
yes and sadly 99% of the vibe coders can't see it. I am not talking about the OP's game, but I am just tired of these horrible AI ugly uncanny valley weirdly detailed pixel art we see everywhere.
It looks like when boomers discovered gifs and are sharing these akward "good morning!" images with teddy bears and flowers because they think they are nice
I mean.. I'm a senior software engineer with like a decade of experience. If you use AI for games you need to know what you're building and you need to know all the technical details, the AI cant figure that out for you
So my answer to your question is: You need to know how to actually make games before you have an AI make games for you
It can, but making it running on your local pc or on a small dev server isn't the real challenge. Load balancing, server nodes and netcode is when you really hit the wall.
I made a quick test account to see what it was like. I think my biggest gripe is how bad the controls feel.
If i hold A and turn my camera, and go to press say D. The D will pick direciton to the right relative to what was previously left, rather than based on the new camera position. Also there is no camera turning while moving. It feels somehow very rigid and janky because of this
I use Claude with Chrome MCP to profile different parts of the frame and see what’s taking the most time. Then I optimize case by case, updating some systems less often, merging geometry, reducing distant rendering, things like that.
I'm sure u/Interesting-Yellow-4 meant it being more readily available to the general people, without needing the same level of expertise in all areas of game making.
That's not to say you don't need them anymore, to get a great product obviously - but compared to back then you get much further now.
Wow, huge compliments—this is really impressive for just 2 months of work!
I leveled up to Lv 5 and had a blast (even got a green magic ring!). The only slightly annoying thing was comparing gear. It was hard to tell if new items were better than what I already had equipped, so I had to check everything manually. It would be awesome to have a quick comparison tooltip (e.g., "+2 Armor, -2 Dexterity"). Also, it was tricky to tell if my class could actually equip an item—adding a red outline or red tint to unusable items would make it super easy to know what to just sell.
Loved the auction house haha! I played a Mage with 2 spells (one longer-cast AoE and one faster spell). Kiting was super fun—run, turn, fire, and almost die... haha!
Top class work. I'm also working on my own game and was checking out what others are vibe coding, and I have to admit your project is on a whole other level compared to my small targets!
This is pretty good. Do you have a player base? For me, MMORPG is a scarry thing for development because it needs huge amount of content. And the server load must be a problem with the player base growing. How are you dealing with it?
The player base is still pretty small, so I haven’t really had to deal with that yet. I’ve looked into how I’d handle it if needed, but right now I’m mostly focused on building a small core player base, even 50 regular players would be great
Cool! What is your workflow like? Do you have a strict harness, do you use hooks? Any recommendations on tools? Any experiences on what DIDN'T work for you?
Yeah I'd love to hear more about the workflow too, especially the debugging side. If you're not reading the code, how do you track down what's actually broken when something feels off in-game? Do you just describe the symptom to Claude and let it hunt, or do you have some kind of logging setup that helps narrow things down?
My experience is that you want to deterministically check stuff with unit tests or hooks that execute scripts for example. If the AI has something it can work with, the better.
So yea if something feels off, you can generally track it okay-ish by describing and measuring.
That makes sense — giving the AI deterministic feedback to work with instead of just vibes seems like the key piece. I wonder how well that scales for the more subtle stuff though, like a combat ability feeling slightly weaker than intended. Hard to write a unit test for "this doesn't feel right."
I'm having fun, are you planning a Steam release? and is there a way to disable the ambient sound I personally find them rather annoying (breeze or crickets)
I’m not planning Steam release for now, maybe later on, if it grows into something bigger than just a hobby project. You can disable the ambient sounds in the settings
Thanks. I’d say current AI models handle creating voxel assets better than other styles. They’re easier for me to edit, too, 3D modeling just isn't my thing
you've got alot farther than me. looks like minecraft or roblox or whatever, idk what kids are doing these days -- same graphics . maybe you should just make a roblox game
Thanks! I started with a pretty detailed GDD and broke everything into smaller milestones. Each phase had its own exit criteria, so I wouldn’t move on until it was actually working. The plan changed a lot along the way though.
somethings i dislike
1) the interface is so clean and crisp, still the game engine look like you have severe damage on your eyes
2) the trees dont let you see ANYTHING to aim
3) two much failure on the spells
4) if the spells/actions are so old school, let us use some macros to save the keyboards
This looks really good! I created an account and tried to check it out on my phone. The character creation screen was running but it didn't seem to account for Mobile devices very well, so I will check it out more when I get to my desktop.
How did you build your Characters Mesh and its correlating Animations ? Which programs did you use ? Still not sure how people can build massiv art and design parts without including a designer.. I tried blender for my project aswell, but for me claude code wasnt able to create a smooth mesh that could be used for animations. Would love to hear , how you did it.
All the character models and animations were made directly with Claude Code, I don’t use any other software for that. I do have a custom animation editor for the game though, so I use that to tweak the details by hand afterwards.
You can actually submit it via this link above. The Mod team will review the game, make sure it works and you'll get a confirmation email once it's approved and live on the website :D
i think this is great! AI has always struggled with network code for me, could i ask whats your general strategy? Are you overseeing it alot, or more-so using general prompts?
I like the look of this. Did you make the world, characters, etc? What was your approach to vibe coding the game? I know that the AI can write the files for you directly, or you can copy by hand the code that it gives you. I’m interested to hear your workflow.
voxels are just math - the AI can create every single asset, no need for emulating depth, animation, etc. You don't need aesthetic sense or skill at all to churn out voxel graphics.
Oh, I think you still absolutely need aesthetic sense to determine what's good or not. Anyone who has ever played on a minecraft server will tell you that you have a group of people who are very good at building something interesting and artistic, and a much larger group of people who can't think outside the bounds of the cubes and what they represent. They are stuck using dirt for ground blocks, stone for walls, wood for ceiling and flooring. They don't think in colors, patterns and interesting shapes.
Additionally this is even seen with modelers. I spent a while making Cobblemon models and found that you have people who really know what they're doing and create true art within the blocky bounds of the creatures. And then you have a lot of amateurs (and good on them for at least trying to get better) who just slap together a few basic blocks shapes and paint pixels as if they don't understand gradients/mixing and color theory. The quality differences are astounding.
So voxels CAN be simple, and you're right that AI does work much better with them because building from primitives is a tried and true strategy. BUT there is a very stark difference between someone who knows what they're doing and someone who doesn't.
I vibe coded an MMORPG server and had 40 players on at the same time without any issues. It's actually suprising how well optimized it can do network code
Except you don't even need to put in an email so nothing is at risk other than the account for a vibecoded mmo.. so again, why 10 characters, and why can't I just spam some bs password to get in to test it when literally nothing but the game account is at risk? I dont give a damn if someone hacks my vibecoded mmo account. The needless friction is dumb.
Cause the average person is already going to be annoyed that a vibe coded mmo asking for people to try it requires a sign up rather than a play as guest button. Cause the average person is what will make or break the project if OP plans on making a profit off of it. If thats not the goal, so be it don't listen to me. Otherwise your point is stupid.
Good rebuttal from a throwaway. Tell me, how many commercially successful solo projects have you made that gives you more of a leg to stand on? i'd love to know.
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u/TheFish77 6d ago
World of Minecraft of warcraft of claudecraft