Raverie Engine bets a pure-WASM editor revives Flash-style games; 644-pt HN

Raverie Engine is an open-source, component-based game engine and editor forked from Zero Engine, which Trevor Sundberg and teammates built for DigiPen Institute of Technology. The Raverie build compiles both the engine and its full editor to WebAssembly using only clang — no Emscripten glue, no WASI imports — so the editor runs entirely inside a browser tab, with a scriptable renderer, physics that handle 2D and 3D together, an in-house type-safe scripting language (Zilch) with autocomplete, and Spaces for instantiating several worlds at once.

The bet is that the browser can host the whole game-making experience: the post declares a dream of exporting a build of your game to any platform from inside the browser, and the end goal is an online Flash-like hub where people share and remix games, akin to Scratch or Tinkercad. Pure WASM was deliberate — a single header defines every platform import the engine needs, so porting to any WASM-capable host should be trivial.

Raverie launched on Hacker News on 2023-09-26, days into Unity's pricing controversy, and drew 644 points with 159 comments. Users ran the editor on phones, praised the Spaces design, compared it with Godot and PlayCanvas, and reported real problems — a 37 MB runtime (11 MB compressed), slow frame rates on some machines, Firefox stalls. The team answered in-thread, shipped same-day frame-rate and DPI fixes, and published a roadmap for WebAudio, debugging, networking and database saves.

No funding, revenue or corporate structure appears in the material; Trevor described the project as primarily a learning tool with no intention of competing with bigger-name engines. As of 2026-09-05 both the repository and the in-browser editor are still live, and the README still promises a lightweight engine that recreates the Flash experience — the Flash-like hub itself has not been shown shipped.