Nitrode (YC W25)

Building a 3D game from scratch in less than 2 days? It used to be impossible—until now. Last week, our co-founders Sejoon Chang and Richard Gu teamed up with Ein Jun and Pauline Wee to build The Anachronist, a 3D educational game where players travel through time to solve historical mysteries. We brought our vision to reality at America's largest collegiate hackathon—TreeHacks 2025—and we did it all in just a weekend using the Nitrode (YC W25) engine. For most of us, it was our first time ever building a game. Traditionally, creating a 3D game could take months, but with Nitrode's AI-powered tools, we streamlined the entire game dev process—leveraging real-time asset creation, AI code generation, and automated workflows to bring our vision to life. And the results? We won the "Best Reimagining Visual Creation with AI" award, sponsored by Luma AI! ?? This is just the beginning of what AI can do for creative development. Our benchmark throughout this journey is, how good of a game can be built in 2 days? In December, it was a 2-D shovelware. In January, it was 2-D Street Fighter. Two weeks ago, it was the Anachronist, similar to Carmen Sandiego. Now we're at GTA 4. By March, users can build their own GTA 6. Our AI asset generator and world generator will be live on the 28th, along with improvements to chat assistant, code-assist, and code generation. Stay tuned—we’re just getting started. ?? Check out our demo: https://lnkd.in/gFESe3-h Our game will be available to play soon here! https://lnkd.in/gz929VjQ

We’re thrilled to announce that Nitrode (YC W25) is backed by Y Combinator! As major Super Mario nerds, we'd been itching to build video games since middle school—but were daunted by the prospect of tackling game-building and the steep learning curve it brought. We quickly realized we weren’t alone, and set about bringing our childhood dreams to life with Nitrode, turning every passionate gamer and aspiring game creator into a game developer. Using AI, Nitrode streamlines the game creation and launching process, breaking archaic standards of complex mechanics, assets, and world generation of game development allowing creators to focus on their vision. We’re a team of passionate builders—Ben Kim and Sejoon Chang have been friends for almost a decade since their first meeting in homeroom in middle school, while Richard Gu, Brian La, and Ben met in college and have been roommates for the past four years. The whole team is close friends and is hell-bent on shipping new features to improve the game development experience. After a successful beta launch 2 weeks ago, we’ve observed feedback and have fixed several bugs related to project creation and project imports. We are also proud to report that within the next 2 weeks, we will be rolling out Nitrode asset generation and 3-D game creation as well as a significant upgrade to world generation. We will publicly announce when the major launches are live; please join us in revolutionizing game development, and try us out! Also, it’s not too late to apply for the X25 batch at Y Combinator. If you have an interview coming up, feel free to reach out to us and we’d be happy to help.

The journey with Nitrode starts now. Check out our debut on Y Combinator.