Web Native Game Development

Web Native Game Development

Author: Software Engineering Daily June 4, 2026 Duration: 54:08

The web has quietly become one of the most capable platforms for game development. Advances in WebAssembly, WebGL, and WebGPU have given developers tools that rival native desktop performance, while game engines like Unity and Godot have added robust web export pipelines. However, building games for the browser comes with its own set of constraints including file size, browser compatibility, and the need to quickly capture and maintain the player’s attention.

Erik Dubbelboer is a Principal Engineer at Poki which is a web games platform serving over 100 million monthly users. He’s also a game developer himself, with titles including Silly Skies and Village Builder. His unusual position building developer tools that power the platform, while also shipping games on it, gives him a rare perspective on what it actually takes to succeed in web game development.

In this episode, Erik joins Joe Nash to discuss the history of web games from the Flash era to today’s renaissance, how WebAssembly and WebGPU have transformed what is possible in the browser, the tradeoffs between different game engines for web publishing, and more.

Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Web Native Game Development appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.


Dive deep into the conversations shaping the future of artificial intelligence with the Machine Learning Archives-Software Engineering Daily. This curated collection pulls from the broader Software Engineering Daily library, focusing entirely on the intricate world of ML engineering. Each episode features a detailed, technical interview with engineers, researchers, and architects who are building the systems behind today's most advanced AI. You'll hear them break down complex topics like model deployment, data pipeline challenges, and the practical trade-offs involved in taking research from a notebook into production. The discussions are grounded in real-world implementation, moving beyond theoretical concepts to explore the tools, failures, and successes that define the field. For developers and technical leaders looking to understand the nuts and bolts of applied machine learning, this podcast offers a valuable archive of knowledge. It's a direct line to the practitioners who are solving hard problems every day, providing insights you can apply to your own work. Tune in to gain a clearer perspective on how machine learning is integrated into modern software, one detailed conversation at a time.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
Rebuilding the Cloud for AI Agent Code [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:57
For two decades, the cloud has been shaped by human developers writing code and managing its deployment. Now a growing share of production code is generated by LLMs with little human review. Because that code is not full…
SED News: The Kimi Moment, Runaway AI, and Tokenmaxxing [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:28
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this…
The Terminal as an Agentic Interface [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:21
The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the ter…
AI-Powered Threats to the Software Supply Chain [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:21
Open source software underpins virtually every modern application. That ubiquity is a superpower for developers, but it is also an expanding attack surface. Software supply chain attacks were once rare but are now happen…
Docker and Sandboxing AI Agents [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:50
The most useful coding agents can mutate their environments by downloading packages, writing files, and connecting to services across the network. However, that freedom also presents dangers, and promises to usher in a n…
The Startup Scene in Southeast Asia [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:50
Golden Gate Ventures is one of Southeast Asia’s most established early-stage venture firms, having backed companies across the region since 2011. They have invested in companies that are now household names in the region…
NanoClaw and the Rise of Personal AI Agents [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:03:35
AI agents have shown remarkable potential to function as persistent digital assistants that are capable of monitoring data, managing communications, and taking action autonomously over long periods. OpenClaw was one of t…
Agentic DevOps at AWS [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:56
AI agents have become capable of reasoning across large amounts of data, calling tools, and taking sequences of actions autonomously. These qualities make them well suited to some of the most persistent pain points in De…
AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:04
AI agents have transformed how software gets written, but the operational side of running software in production has not yet experienced a similar revolution. The same teams responsible for keeping systems healthy, inves…
Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:28
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introdu…