Backend Engineer Builds Browser Game That Accidentally Required His Exact Monitor

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A backend engineer with no game development experience built a synthwave 3D browser driving game called Sunday DEV Drive over a single weekend as part of a DEV Community challenge. The game, built using Three.js, displays a user's DEV Community articles as neon billboards along an endless highway and runs entirely client-side. After shipping it, the developer discovered a critical bug: the game's physics were tied to the monitor's refresh rate, meaning it behaved differently on any screen other than his own. The root cause was that game logic was updated per frame rather than per unit of time, a classic game development pitfall known as frame-rate-dependent physics. He fixed the issue by implementing a delta time pattern, ensuring movement and physics calculations scale correctly regardless of the display's refresh rate.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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