Lyceum – An MMO game built with Zig and Erlang
Hey HN, this is a small project myself and closer friends have been building on our free time (https://github.com/Dr-Nekoma/lyceum), it finally reached 0.1.0, we are open to feedback! The original idea was to experiment with Zig + Raylib, eventually we wrote a small server in Erlang as well. We started by first interacting with Erlang via its C bindings, but this eventually led to some of us to prototyping our own tooling to better integrate Zig types with Erlang, we called such tool "zerl" as its avaliable here…
Lyceum – An MMO game built with Zig and Erlang launched on November 5, 2024 with 148 votes, #292 of 4,990 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Lyceum is a multiplayer online game built using Zig for the client with Raylib graphics and Erlang for the server backend. The project includes zerl, a tool for integrating Zig types with Erlang, addressing challenges in the two-language integration. Developed as a collaborative hobby project by a group of programmers, it uses Nix for development infrastructure and has reached version 0.1.0. The codebase is available on GitHub.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
An MMO game written in Erlang + PostgreSQL (+ Omnigres) + Zig (+ Raylib), powered by a Nix-based devenv - Dr-Nekoma/lyceum
This is Lyceum — an MMO game with the server written in Erlang and the client written in Zig (supercharged with raylib and Zerl ). There are several ways to run this project, but they all leverage Nix . We have a single devenv configured, that has all the tooling required to run this project, it also includes postgres. # To enter the developmet shell nix develop --impure # To spawn postgres (for instance) devenv up -d For more commands, make sure to check just . # Will list all commands we have right now just to migrate the local dababase, you can use just db-up or db-up . You can also build the server and related OCI images with Nix. nix build . # server if you prefer running a container…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, this is a small project myself and closer friends have been building on our free time (https://github.com/Dr-Nekoma/lyceum), it finally reached 0.1.0, we are open to feedback! The original idea was to experiment with Zig + Raylib, eventually we wrote a small server in Erlang as well. We…
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