Lessons from Building a game engine from scratch in Gleam
summary
A browser game engine built in Gleam is underway, chosen because it compiles to JS and Erlang so the client uses canvas while the server leverages the BEAM for concurrency. Concrete wins and headaches: sprite animation via requestAnimationFrame, handling 60fps logic on 120Hz screens, a 4.46ms rounding gap that costs ~15 frames/sec, and a 170ms pause equating to ~10 pending updates that can cause a death spiral unless capped. Implementations include fixed-update/variable-render and an accumulator to reclaim partial frames.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Building a game engine
- 2:03Why Gleam for browser
- 5:11Two key lessons
- 6:56Lesson one: game loop complexity
- 17:09Lesson two: AI and community
- 19:16Ambitious projects shape careers
- 20:41Should you take on ambitious projects
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