The browser kicked me out (of the CPU): Making a three.js WebGL mobile game
summary
Built a mobile browser game in JavaScript ES6 that uses three.js WebGL for rendering and FMOD for audio, targeting Instagram/links-first play rather than app stores. Faces device and browser fragmentation; CPU-side matrix updates for hundreds of moving pedestrians become the bottleneck, instancing cuts draw calls but not CPU time, and audio drops happen when the single-threaded JS runtime starves FMOD buffers. Ship strategy: cap to ~30 FPS, prefer Web Audio/howler.js, or push animation into GPU and own memory layout.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:15Project overview
- 6:57Game features
- 8:01Device challenges
- 12:55Three.js intro
- 15:47Performance bottlenecks
- 18:17Instancing trade-offs
- 21:30Web Share API issues
- 24:18Audio processing limits
- 26:50CPU throttling
- 27:54Testing results
- 30:00Lessons learned
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