New project, and I'm starting it the same way I start everything: slightly out of my depth, in public.
I build web things. TypeScript, the browser, 2D canvas — that's home. The new project, NUMEN, is a god-game: you raise a creature and a little world grows around it. Which means for the first time I need 3D. And I have never made a single 3D model in my life.
So this post isn't a tutorial. It's day one.
The first thing I did was generate a creature with Meshy — text and an image in, a .glb model out. A cow, in three versions: gentle, neutral, and a darker one for when the creature gets raised badly. Twenty minutes ago they didn't exist; now they're sitting in my assets folder, rotating in a viewer, looking back at me.
Here's the honest part, the thing I want to remember when this gets hard: getting a model out was easy. That's not the work.
Two things hit me immediately:
One model isn't a world. A cow that looks great alone means nothing if the temple, the trees, and the terrain all look like they came from different games. The actual skill I have to learn isn't "generate a creature" — it's keeping a whole world consistent. One style, every asset, or it's just a bag of mismatched outputs.
It's not even in the game yet. My renderer is still a 2D placeholder. These .glb files are raw material, not a running scene. Wiring them into an actual 3D engine is the next mountain, and I haven't climbed it.
So I'm not going to pretend I've "added 3D to my game." I made one creature. The renderer's still 2D. I don't know yet if I can pull the art of a whole world together as a solo dev who learned 3D yesterday.
But there's a cow standing in 3D space that wasn't there this morning. For day one, that's enough to keep going.
If you've made the jump from 2D/web into 3D: what's the thing you wish someone had told you on day one?
SOCIAL SHARE CARD GENERATOR