I'm Yang, Founder & CEO of Wanaka.
A bit about us:
I scaled ByteDance's Helo to 50M DAU, and co-founded Livein (#1 on the US App Store) and AnswerAI (top-3 AI education app in North America, 6M+ users)
My CTO spent 10 years at ByteDance leading recommendation & LLM RL at Seed, with a computer graphics background from SJTU
Our core team comes from ByteDance Seed and miHoYo
Together, we're uniting top-tier AI agent research with deep game-engine engineering.
Today, we're launching Wanaka Studio: the first all-in-one, AI-native game engine built from the ground up for both humans and AI. Anyone can build high-quality 3D games, with zero coding required.
💡 Why we built Wanaka Studio
Making a game should be as easy as making a video. Photos and videos had their UGC revolutions because editing apps made creation effortless. Games never did, because the barrier was too high. We believe AI finally makes game creation accessible to everyone.
Existing AI game-dev paths hit a dead end. We went deep on the two main approaches in the market today and found fatal flaws in both. Our takeaway: LLMs won't replace professional software. Instead, AI needs better software. All pro software deserves to be rebuilt from scratch for one simple reason: the user has changed.
So we built a brand-new game engine where both humans and AI are first-class citizens.
🚀 What makes it special: Ultimate Ease of Use × AAA-Grade Quality
An Engine-Native AI Agent That Actually Works. Why does our Agent succeed where general coding agents fail? It doesn't write raw boilerplate from scratch. It operates on an engine co-designed for AI, with clean declarative APIs, 30+ atomic engine tools (physics, terrain, prefabs, behaviors, lighting), and a closed-loop self-playtest & rollback system that inspects the live runtime, catches bugs, and fixes its own mistakes.
All-in-One Game IDE & Visual Editor. No black-box prompt roulette. The Agent and the visual IDE stay in real-time, two-way sync. Prompt for speed and get readable, structured game design & logic, then click straight into the 3D viewport to drag assets and fine-tune parameters. The Agent immediately understands every manual edit you make.
3D Character Generation & Rigging. Generate custom 3D characters with built-in skeletal rigging and animations in seconds.
Native Multiplayer. Built-in networking and state sync let you turn any creation into a multiplayer game to play with friends.
One-Click Publishing. Share your game instantly via a link. Zero deployment headaches.
🎮 Come build with us! 👉 Try Wanaka Studio: https://studio.wanaka.app/ Our team is in the comments all day. Build a world and let us know what you think! 🙏🔥
🍎Some Thoughts on Why We Built Wanaka
We have always believed that games are one of the ultimate expressions of human creativity. You conjure a world from nothing, define its laws, breathe life into its characters, and invite others to experience it as their own.
Making a game has demanded a brutal barrier to entry. Brilliant ideas were too often trapped behind a wall of code, complex engines, 3D modeling, physics, and years of specialized craft.
The rise of AI marks a genuine turning point.
As models learn to understand natural language, write code, and generate 3D assets, tasks once reserved for veteran studios are finally within reach of anyone with a vision. The gap between imagining a game and building it is closing fast.
But that raises a deeper question: if all it takes is a single prompt to churn out a game, are we empowering creators, or are we quietly handing the act of creation over to the machine?
We refuse to take that second path.
Anyone can prompt an AI to spit out a playable loop. But what makes a game memorable, distinct, and truly alive is still the person behind it — your taste, your instincts, your creative friction, and the quiet obsession of asking: "Not quite... let's try that again." That is where the magic happens.
Wanaka is built to tear down technical walls, not to replace the human soul of game design.
We don't believe the future belongs to frictionless, homogenized AI templates. We believe AI should unlock the door, while you remain firmly in the director's chair.
A great game isn't just "generated." It is authored, sculpted, and brought to life through taste and iteration.
And that director is you.
That is why we built Wanaka.
— The Wanaka Team, 2026
Insanely nice demos - really impressive engine from the team!
This is a really interesting take on making game development more accessible! What stood out to me is that it’s not just about generating a 3D game through prompts, but having the AI agent and visual editor work together in sync, so you can actually jump in and fine-tune things yourself.
Congratulations on the launch, @mariacalabriapr and @yang_zhang21 ! Really impressive work by the team.
