Show HN: Instance – Clean room GameMaker 8.1 in Rust built with Claude Opus 5.5

Category: devtools

Tags: rust, gamedev, gamemaker, wasm, clean-room, ide

Score: 8.5/10 (Innovation: 8, Technical: 10, Documentation: 9, Utility: 7)

Instance is a clean-room reimplementation of the GameMaker 8.1 IDE and runtime written from scratch in Rust, complete with a full visual editor, GML interpreter, drag-and-drop actions, 3D rendering, and WebAssembly browser support. The fidelity to legacy engine quirks (rng, event ordering, sound timing) verified with black-box tests is unusually rigorous, and shipping the entire IDE and player as WASM with bundled classic examples (including Spelunky) is a striking technical achievement.

Target audience: game developers, retro game preservationists, Rust systems programmers, and existing GameMaker/GML users

Repository: https://github.com/groverburger/instance · Rust · MIT

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