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Web game engines in 2026: PlayCanvas vs Three.js vs Babylon.js vs Unity WebGL A current, honest comparison of the main ways to build a 3D game in the browser. What each engine actually is, who it's for, WebGL2 vs WebGPU support, licensing, and a decision guide for choosing in 2026. Read more →
Why we built our own WebGPU engine instead of forking PlayCanvas We evaluated Three.js, Babylon.js, PlayCanvas, and Unity WebGL before writing our own renderer. Here's what each is good at, the four decisions that pushed us off the shelf (WebGPU-only, a custom character solver instead of Rapier, animation retargeting, in-world creation), and the cases where you should not do what we did. Read more →
An empty world is a sad world: what every creator platform that lived or died can teach us We built an AI that constructs whole buildings in a shared 3D world from a sentence. Before opening it to everyone, we read the obituaries: Horizon Worlds, Decentraland, Dreams, Crayta, and the handful that lived (Roblox, Minecraft, the .io games, Figma). The line between them is sharper than the hype admits. The stories, the leaked numbers, the paradox at the center, and what we're doing differently. Read more →
How modern engines beat foliage overdraw Z-prepasses, octahedral imposters, GPU-driven cluster culling, hashed alpha, visibility buffers, and distance-field shadows. The full stack of techniques that turns 8-15x foliage overdraw into 1-2x in dense forest scenes, with the canonical papers and engine talks behind each piece. Read more →
Volumetric clouds and weather effects in modern games How modern games render volumetric clouds, atmospheric scattering, fog, rain, snow, and dynamic weather. From Nubis voxel cloudscapes to froxel-grid fog, wet PBR, and snow deformation, with the foundational papers and engine talks behind each technique. Read more →
A short list of rendering techniques used in modern AAA games The core rendering techniques behind today's AAA visuals: PBR, Nanite-style virtualized geometry, Lumen-style global illumination, ReSTIR ray tracing, and ML-based upscaling like DLSS and FSR. Read more →
What it actually takes to build an open world in a browser A journalistic walkthrough of our 12-part engineering series: 24 spike experiments, from ugly terrain baselines to GPU marching cubes, streaming LOD, and the Transvoxel seam nightmare. The methodology matters as much as the tech. Read more →
From sketch to video and playable 3D Lock a high-fidelity character from a sketch, write a short beat, illustrate start and end frames, generate the clip, then build a textured mesh, Mixamo-style rig, and a browser-ready character. Read more →
Building an open world in the browser, from Spike 1 to Spike 24 We documented the full engineering journey as a 12-part series. It includes wins, dead ends, seam nightmares, recovery patterns, and live runnable spikes embedded in each chapter. If you are building browser 3D terrain, this is the complete trail we wish we had when we started. Open the series guide →
A Breaker Belt: vibe coding a cross-genre game in 3 days Snake meets Arkanoid. Custom art, music, SFX, mechanics, levels, and story. Built by one to two people in about three days of vibe coding on Cinevva. Published on web, mobile, and PC. The kind of game a seven-person team would spend months on. Read more →
We didn't expect to build a radio station We have a music generator so game creators can make soundtracks. Then people started making music just because they could. One creator, Bella Bay, made over 100 tracks in two weeks. 362 tracks across 8 stations later, Cinevva Radio is live. Read more →
The intuitive mind in an age of AI Jensen Huang said AI has commoditized raw logic and computation. So what's left for humans? Intuition. The ability to sense what's missing and see around corners before the data appears. Here's why that resonates with someone who failed the SAT, ignored the rules, and built something people actually wanted. Read more →
The job market is transforming — from credentials to skills My cousin graduated with honors in CS. Spent fourteen months job hunting. Meanwhile, a dropout friend with five shipped indie games had three offers in a month. That's not an anomaly anymore. 90% of HR leaders now hire outside traditional degrees, and 94% say skills-based hires outperform credential-based ones. Here's what that means if you're starting out. Read more →
AI controversy, trust, and the post‑AI economy for games AI in games turned into a minefield around mid-2024. Voice actors cloned without consent. "AI slop" becoming shorthand for hollow work. Award nominations pulled over development placeholders. We run a platform, and you learn one thing fast: nobody likes feeling tricked. The debate won't settle anytime soon, but filters and honest labeling might actually work. Read more →
Prompting My Way Into Making 3D Games — And It Changes Everything For decades, building a 3D game meant learning to code, mastering complex engines, setting up scenes by hand. I built a playable asteroid shooter and flight sim in three evenings just by prompting. That's not a demo. That's a different world. Read on Medium ↗
Interview with "Tech Done Different" Ted Harrington asked the hard questions about Cinevva, the gaming industry, and what it's like being a creative in a world of engineers. We talked about bridging the gap between artists and developers, our biggest failures, and where gaming is actually headed. Read on Medium ↗
What will the value of an NFT be in 5 years from now? With all the noise around NFT trading, it's easy to get lost in the hype. Can you trust the uniqueness of artwork minted on today's blockchain? We dug into the stats and asked whether NFTs are here to last. Read on Medium ↗
"The future belongs to us: a world that we control, not a world that controls us." Oleg Sidorkin joined Cinevva as CTO & Co-Founder. This piece covers his vision for decentralized gaming, why he left a comfortable path, and what we're building together. Read on Medium ↗
Decentralised Platforms and the Future of Game Creators The current model for game distribution is broken for creators. Platforms take too much, discovery is a lottery, and ownership is murky. Here's how decentralization changes the equation. Read on Medium ↗
Cinevva on Bloomberg and Amazon Prime I pitched live on the #2MinuteDrill Show Season 2, broadcasted on Bloomberg TV. Two minutes to explain what we're building and why it matters. Read on Medium ↗
How VIO Makes It Easy for Anyone to Build Games AI and machine learning aren't just buzzwords here. They're the reason someone with zero coding experience can build a playable game. This is how the tech actually works under the hood. Read on Medium ↗
Goodbye, 2020! Hello, 2021! Looking back at a wild year. Mozilla Builders, first users, pivots that worked and ones that didn't. The defining moments that shaped what Cinevva became. Read on Medium ↗
VIO Wins the Mozilla Builder Award at The Fix The Net Showcase We won. Out of hundreds of projects in the Mozilla Builders program, VIO took home the Builder Award. This is what that moment meant to us. Read on Medium ↗
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