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Carlo Miguel Dy
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Acc. XIII · Ludus voxelensis — four-prototype systems lab, cultivated 2026

Interactive Systems Lab — Embervale, Emberkeep, Voxel Warlock, Conquer Brawl

Systems R&D engineer · May 2026 – Present · Independent studio

Browser-game systems R&D across four prototypes — real-time rendering, physics, procedural worlds, P2P networking, ECS, asset pipelines, and performance engineering.

Ludus voxelensis — four-prototype systems lab, cultivated 2026

Field notes

The context

Deliberate R&D: use browser-game builds to deepen real-time rendering, physics, procedural-world, state-management, asset-pipeline, and performance engineering skills — and to pressure-test how far structured agent workflows carry genuinely hard interactive systems.

Cultivation

What I built

  • Embervale — cozy angled top-down voxel PvE prototype on React Three Fiber, Rapier physics, Zustand state, and Blender Python asset generation; established the rendering, physics, state, and generated-asset foundation the lab reuses.
  • Emberkeep — open-world browser systems and MMORPG architecture exploration evolved from Embervale: streamed zones, level-60 progression, quests, bosses, capitals, population, weather, day cycle, and water systems, with a Rust/WASM worker for off-thread zone baking, bundle-splitting and performance checks, and asset-bake parity verification.
  • Voxel Warlock Brawl Arena — Three.js/WebGL voxel arena with P2P multiplayer, maintained through structured audits: feature-gap analysis converted into issues and backlog, broad automated tests across simulation, spells, matchmaking, collision, and physics, and repository-level model-tier review policies.
  • Conquer Brawl — eight-class roguelike browser brawler with P2P multiplayer, Rapier physics, Miniplex ECS, audio and post-processing, and an automated Blender + GLTF asset-optimization pipeline, verified with Vitest.

Root system

How it works

All four run in the browser: React Three Fiber or raw Three.js rendering, Rapier for physics, Zustand or Miniplex ECS for simulation state, P2P networking where multiplayer applies, and Blender Python pipelines generating and optimizing assets. Emberkeep pushes furthest — streamed world zones baked off-thread in a Rust/WASM worker against a strict browser frame budget.

Harvest

Outcomes

  • Four working prototypes spanning PvE, open-world streaming, and two P2P multiplayer arenas — all technical prototypes, with no commercial-launch or player-scale claims.
  • A Rust/WASM off-thread zone-baking worker shipped inside a browser game.
  • An agent-maintained codebase (Voxel Warlock) kept healthy through audits, automated tests, and model-tiered review rather than ad-hoc patching.
Pressed leaf — what it taught
Games are the harshest test of agent-assisted engineering: frame budgets, emergent state, and asset pipelines punish shallow work immediately. The lab's transferable yield is systems judgment — streaming, ECS, off-thread compute — not the games themselves.