April 30, 2026
Rip and tear... the comment section
Show HN: I wrote a DOOM clone in my own programming language
One coder built a retro shooter from scratch — and the comments instantly started nitpicking the nostalgia
TLDR: A developer made a retro shooter in a programming language they also built, turning a coding experiment into a playable game. Commenters were split between admiration and classic nerd correction, with the biggest debate being that it looks less like DOOM and more like Wolfenstein 3D.
A solo developer rolled into Show HN with Cubedoom, a tiny old-school shooter made entirely in their own programming language, Spectre, and the crowd reacted exactly how internet game nerds always do: half impressed, half ready to argue over history. On paper, it’s a love letter to the earliest 3D shooters — maze-like levels, enemies, health bar, minimap, and that classic head-bobbing movement. The creator says more is coming, including sound, ammo, and more monsters. But in the comments, the real boss battle wasn’t in the game — it was over whether this is even “DOOM” at all.
The hottest correction came fast: one commenter basically slammed the brakes on the title and declared, this is not really DOOM, it’s more like Wolfenstein 3D. That kicked off the kind of retro-pedantry that fuels the internet, with another user piling on by saying the visual trick used here looks a lot like a famous beginner tutorial. Ouch. Still, the vibe wasn’t all snark. Some people were just delighted by the throwback energy, cheering that these ancient shooters are still fun decades later, while another summed up the dream with pure envy: making a whole game in your own language has to feel amazing. And then, in perfect comment-section fashion, someone delivered the ultimate review: “nice.” Honestly? No notes.
Key Points
- •Cubedoom is an arena shooter written entirely in the Spectre Programming Language and uses SDL2 and SDL2_Image libraries.
- •The project was created to explore Spectre’s multi-dimensional arrays and C interoperability features.
- •The game renders its 3D environment with a raycasting technique that casts rays per frame and draws vertical slices based on wall collision distance.
- •Cubedoom currently includes minimal gameplay features such as a single enemy type, viewbob, and a health/minimap HUD, with sound, more enemies, and ammo planned.
- •Spectre v0.0.5 adds a `--translate-c` flag, experimental LLVM and C99 backends, improved type-level invariant syntax, and compile-time optimizations.