Marble Marcher - A Fractal Physics Game

CodeParade
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2025
YouTube
1.7M views · 7 years ago · demo · intermediate · evergreen

CodeParade presents Marble Marcher, a game in which you roll a marble across levels that are 3D fractals. The video explains how fractal geometry is rendered and used as playable physics terrain.

HN people recommend it as a striking example of non-standard fractal rendering and how much detail it can produce.

“amazing how much detail can be rendered using fractals”
Shaders & real-time visualsGame design
#marblemarcher#fractals#raymarching#gamerendering#codeparade

5 comments from Hacker News

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@CyborgCabbage2022 · in “Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?”
He has a YouTube channel as well: link Also you may like Marble Marcher made by Code Parade, it's a game that uses a similar approach to rendering: ▶ this video
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@gitgud2020 · in “Show HN: Fractal garden – realtime 3D fractal explorer in the browser”
This is incredible! If you like this you might also like [1] Marble Marcher, amazing how much detail can be rendered using fractals [1] ▶ this video (Video)
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@lettergram2019 · in “Marble Marcher – A Fractal Physics Game [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@grinstead2025 · in “Show HN: 3D-Fractal Game on WebGPU (Desktop Chrome)”
Ported Marble Marcher over to WebGPU, so no download required. Open source code is on GitHub: link WebGPU is cool. It's exciting to me to see these things working with no download. The actual js for this game is 130kb in all, though the music and sound effects bring the whole distribution to 10mb. The original game is from CodeParade: ▶ this video It can be a bit of a gpu buster, though it runs fine on my M1 Mac. I'm experimenting with SolidJS+WebGPU+Vite as a game engine (link). It's a pretty cool environment to develop in, but building everything from scratch is slow and developing at a hobbyist pace.
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@FrostKiwi2024 · in “AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing”
True, this is something I struggled with writing and ended up with just a small note commenting that this is not widely applicable. Will clarify more in coming posts. It's all incredibly context specific. The reason for this order, is that you can very much can use all these approaches (SSAA, FXAA, MSAA etc.) for rendering simpler shapes and HUDs. So going through them, where these approaches break down and when it does make sense to go the extra mile with SDFs. Still, non-standard rendering approaches are very much a thing [1] and I could see setups like [2] be used in scientific particle visualizations. [1] ▶ this video [2] link
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