Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy. https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

10 years? Man, I envy you. Seriously. You say you work on it in your spare time so it's no like is your life passion or something like that right? How do you keep momentum? I have hundred of never finished projects, and I really struggle to finish them or work on them enough to want to keep doing it. Teach me.

Hah, thanks for the kind words <3

In all seriousness, I think I have the same propensity to have a hundred unfinished projects and have a hard time finding motivation to complete them. The difference might be that I have this 'big' project called a 'game engine' that wraps them all up into some semblance of a cohesive whole. For example, projects that are incomplete, but mostly just good enough to be serviceable (sometimes barely):

1. Font rasterizer 2. Programming language 3. Imgui & layout engine 4. 3D renderer 5. Voxel editor

.. etc

Now, every one of those on their own is pretty boring and borderline useless .. there are (mostly) much better options out there for each in their specific domain. But, squash them all together and it's starting to become a useful thing.

It just happened that I enjoy working on engine tech and I picked a huge project I have no hope of ever finishing. Take from that what you will

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. --Hunter S. Thompson