Hedra – an open-world 3D game I wrote from scratch before LLMs
With the current inflow of LLM aided software, I thought I would share a cool "hand-coded" project from the previous era (I wrote this in highschool so roughly ~8 years ago). Hedra is an open world 3d game written from scratch using only OpenGL and C#. It has quite a few cool features like infinite generation, skinned animated mesh rendering, post processing effects, etc. Originally the physics engine was also written from scratch but i swapped for the more reliable bulletphysics.
Hedra – an open-world 3D game I wrote from scratch before LLMs launched on March 14, 2026 with 11 votes, #1,113 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Hedra is an open-world 3D game built from scratch using OpenGL and C# without AI assistance. The game features infinite procedural generation, skinned animated mesh rendering, post-processing effects, and physics simulation. It was created as a high school project approximately eight years ago and demonstrates hand-coded game development from the pre-LLM era. The source code is available on GitHub.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Hedra is a 3D open world game I wrote from scratch while in highschool. The entire codebase is around +100k LOC - maxilevi/project-hedra
Project Hedra is an ambitious open-world, low-poly RPG. Choose your class, explore endless procedurally generated worlds, unlock different skills and complete procedurally generated quests. I started this project when I was in highschool (around 15 yo) in order to learn how OpenGL worked. The scope creep quickly arrived and after a few years it turned into a fullfledged 3D game and game engine. The codebase has around 100k LOC and the game has first class support for Linux and Windows. The million lines of code are not in vain. The game and engine are both full of featuresfrom github.com
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