alt.hn

1/30/2026 at 5:11:55 PM

IsoCoaster – Theme Park Builder

 https://iso-coaster.com/

by duck

2/2/2026 at 9:38:47 PM

Feels like a vibe coded RCT clone. Cool project, but lacks the polish that makes games actually fun to play.

I'd much rather someone drop https://openrct2.io/ into emscripten with open-source graphics.

by snovymgodym

2/2/2026 at 5:45:22 PM

Plays at ~3fps and with a ~1s latency on all interactions on Firefox, MBP2015 :( Slightly better on Chrome, but the menu is still incredibly laggy and the placement grid lags way behind the mouse cursor. Got to say that the performance isn't exactly that of Rollercoaster Tycoon, famously written by Chris Sawyer in lovingly hand-crafted assembly!

by Sharlin

2/3/2026 at 2:00:13 AM

It definitaly runs slow on Firefox on my M1 Max (<10 fps). It runs butter smooth in Chrome for me on the same machine.

Firefox has some incredibly slow paths in its graphics stack. If you happen to use those you're S.O.L.

by socalgal2

2/2/2026 at 7:24:14 PM

it runs quite fast on a first generation mac studio with safari

by ndr42

2/2/2026 at 6:39:24 PM

yeah I wonder if a rust or wasm backend might be a good idea for something like this

by headcanon

2/2/2026 at 6:45:02 PM

Nah, I think the implementation is just off. Graphics need HW acceleration for modern resolutions, but the whole thing should be fine in vanilla JS. Afaik wasm is just an abstraction on top of a jsvm

by wasmainiac

2/2/2026 at 8:08:50 PM

> Afaik wasm is just an abstraction on top of a jsvm

it is, but as a compiler target there's tons of opportunity for automatic optimization -- in my experience wasm (from rust) tends to be faster then then hand-written js for the same function (although, i'll admit, javascript is far from my strongest language, so take that with a grain of salt)

by bigfishrunning

2/2/2026 at 8:14:30 PM

Wasm objects are what you get in C or other low-level language, with a linear heap and zero metadata. That alone makes it vastly faster and easier to JIT than JavaScript.

by Sharlin

2/2/2026 at 7:11:19 PM

Some criticism, the UX is not very exciting. It's a theme park game, take a look at RC2's menus. Having exciting menus makes you want to click on everything and explore the game! This is very gray, and monotone, and makes you not want to click on anything.

by younglunaman

2/2/2026 at 7:54:29 PM

RC2 had "exciting" menus? they looked like Windows 3.1... made me feel like i was using ancient accounting software. which was actually pretty fitting for the genre.

by woodrowbarlow

2/2/2026 at 8:09:55 PM

Coming from DOS 6, windows 3.1's menus seemed like magic at the time...

by bigfishrunning

2/3/2026 at 6:02:12 PM

well, sure, but RC2 was ten years later.

by woodrowbarlow

2/2/2026 at 6:27:39 PM

The cursor is just bad UX from the start. The click area is off and it looks like you should click and drag but that's not the case. Clearly AI has a very long way to go.

by dawnerd

2/2/2026 at 4:14:05 PM

Very cool demo! Way too "dev design" to be fun to play, but a really awesome showcase of what can be done with pure web tech!

by catapart

2/2/2026 at 10:26:03 PM

Such an interesting showcase of history. RCT was a masterpiece written in Assembly from hand. Looking at code from OpenRCT2 you can really see the thought behind it.

Now ISO Coaster really is a badly slipped together adaptation. A lot of details don’t make sense, graphics often look weird and performance is terrible - all while using tons of compute resources.

by bennett_dev

2/2/2026 at 8:54:12 PM

I never played RCT, I thought this was really fun and was hooked for a good minute.

Ran smoothly on MBP M1+Chrome. I couldn't figure out how to start the kiddie rides or get people through the doors initially. It might be fun to have some kind of daily challenge or competing with other parks. I found clicking in the 3D space to a little tricky.

by catchmeifyoucan

2/2/2026 at 4:02:57 PM

If you have a large screen, make sure you limit your window's size - otherwise the framerate will drop quickly.

by wolframhempel

2/2/2026 at 8:13:43 PM

Wow, some of the comments.

This is fun. I didn't grow up playing RCT but I get the gist. I am a bit confused about two main things: how do you rotate a tile, and what's the relationship between the park entrance and the border tile where the customers enter?

by peteforde

2/2/2026 at 9:43:36 PM

it seemed to me like the park entrance building was just decoration

by jtokoph

2/2/2026 at 10:31:19 PM

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Not saying you're wrong!

by peteforde

2/2/2026 at 4:37:02 PM

considering you are okay with ideating with Gemini, you should focus on creating a concept frame of what a theme park actually looks like, and then just nail the art style. everybody knows what a roller coaster game is, but nobody knows what yours looks like :)

by doctorpangloss

2/2/2026 at 7:45:37 PM

ai slop

by legacynl

2/2/2026 at 10:43:23 PM

Cool

by Johnny_Bonk