[FREE GAME] Dustline: a persistent colony builder, every building assembled from script-generated glTF pieces

[byackee]

Hi all,

I’ve just opened the public alpha of Dustline, a free online colony management game rendered with three.js (r186, vanilla, no React Three Fiber). It runs in the browser and on phones, in English and French.

Dustline · industrial colonies on the Line

A few things that might interest this forum:

• No hand-modelled assets. Buildings are assembled in code, per type and level, from modular glTF pieces that a script generates at build time (Draco-compressed, KTX2 textures). Materials and textures are procedural and shared through one render kit.
• Instancing everywhere for repeated entities, with LOD past 200 instances. The budget is 60 fps on an M-series Mac with 500 buildings and 30 fps on a recent iPhone.
• Day phases, pseudo-seasons and weather (blizzards, dust fronts) driven by the game clock.
• The renderer only reads the state: the simulation lives in a separate deterministic package with integer arithmetic, authoritative on the server.
• A dedicated mobile UI under 768 px, installable as a PWA.

It’s an open alpha (the world may still be reset), free, no ads, no purchases. Feedback on rendering performance on your hardware is especially welcome.

Happy to answer questions about the piece pipeline or the instancing setup.

AI disclosure: Dustline is designed by me, and its code, in-game text and English translation were written with the help of an AI assistant (Claude), under my direction and review. The visuals are procedural: buildings, terrain and sky are generated by code. No AI-generated images, artwork or sound files are used.

[manthrax]

Free code, or gameplay video? It’s often a huuge hurdle to get people to sign up without at least some visual indication of what they can expect for allowing their email to be harvested, so don’t be bummed if you don’t get much traction yet. There is a lot of new game stuff lately, and getting peoples emails is already a high bar.

edit: also check out gdpr rules about email harvesting: Email Marketing - General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

posting a gameplay video or some screenshots on the landing page can go a long way towards aquiring “enthusiastic consent”.

(concept sounds cool though, look forward to seeing more about it and maybe trying it!)

[byackee]

You’re right, I added email verification to keep bots and spammers from taking up spots on the game’s planets.

As for the game visuals, you’re absolutely right — here are a few.

I hope to see you on Kepler