Ex-Blizzard employee has 'vibe' coded a new game engine with backing from AMD: 'We're developing 93x faster than we ever did before with Unreal'

An ex-Blizzard employee claims to have "vibe" coded an engine for their new game. The game is Em-8er and is "entirely 'vibe' coded" in the Kun-Zhi Engine.

"I spent 6 months using AI to replace Unreal Engine from under our game Em-8ER. Now we're developing 93x faster than we ever did before with Unreal. Because our engine is developed to be 100% AI-first instead of tacked on."

"The engine is called Kun-Zhi, the Tibetan word for 'Ground of all' that the world springs from. This engine will be released to the public, starting with backers first... Corporate sponsorships are available... Current partners include Razer and AMD."

"This," the dev says, "is a ground up engine written mostly in C [and also with "some Elixir"] on top of Vulkan."

The developer behind it is Mark Kern, a developer who worked for Blizzard on World of Warcraft (vanilla) and then helped found now-dead studio Red 5 Studios, makers of the equally dead game Firefall.

This game is entirely "vibe" coded.I spent 6 months using AI to replace Unreal Engine from under our game Em-8ER. Now we're developing 93x faster than we ever did before with Unreal. Because our engine is developed to be 100% AI first instead of tacked on.It is not a toy… pic.twitter.com/SCIBlza1qvSeptember 11, 2026

The eagle-eyed among you will notice that Kern puts "vibe" in scare quotes. This, he says, is "because it takes a lot more skill than just prompting. To be production ready you have to have knowledge of how games are put together and how to guide the AI."

"The data structures and architecture become more important. The coding was always the drudge part."

Even the less-eagle-eyed will probably have noticed the character model and a certain level of game physics thereof. Because yes, today's update apparently features "waifus." That's in addition to:

• "Advanced character animation system
• World collision meshes
• AI-assisted Blender anim exporter and workflow
• Character outfits and outfit swapping
• Physics-driven character effects
• Fully networked client/server player capsules
• Pilotable vehicles"

For those interested, the "vibe" coding here was done with a mixture of AI suites: "I use 3 in rotation: Codex, Grok and Claude. I'm mostly on Astra recently."

I'll allow everyone to form their own opinions on this. For my part, on the one hand it is impressive to see an "AI-first" game that has what looks like a bona fide world with character models, physics, collision meshes and so on. Plus if it's true about AMD's and Razer's backing, that lends a little more reason for confidence. On the other hand, to my eyes it still looks far more janky and unpolished than games made in standard engines like Unreal or Unity.

Plus, we're looking at hand-picked capture. Who knows what it plays like when the reins are handed over? Well, I suppose backers can now find out for themselves, if they wish.