Who am i

I’m Daniel Chen, a fellow game/engine developer focusing on graphics, networking and performance optimizations development. I’m also known as CodingDaniel from Banana Shooter (2021).

2020

I learnt programming back in 2020 because of the pandemic, my first programming language was c++. But i stopped at the basics at struct in c++ and just moved on to school and life.

2021

In 2021, I encountered a youtuber called Dani who is famous for making indie games and funny videos on Youtube. I was encouraged by him to learn game development, resulting me publishing two simpe free indie games on itch.io (Beanson and Stickman simulator) in just 6 months. I learnt Unity and C# back in July 2021, and published Beanson in October 2021, then published Stickman Simulator in Jan 2022.

The funny thing is I completely skipped single player game and went straight to multiplayer game development, which by now I’m still mainly focusing on multiplayer game development and it’s just fascinating to do multiplayer game development due to how rewarding it is.

2022

This was the year I released my first and last commercial game on steam to these days. The release date was 2021-05-01. I won’t go over the reasoning behind making this game since it’s way too long. But I never thought the impact this game can make. It’s crazy to me how an unintended microtransaction feature can be utilized in such a not so well-made game. It was like a dream back then to see a single person game gets 1 million downloads, and it’s still insane to see it is currently sitting at 4 million downloads.

2023

This was the struggle year for me, Banana Shooter has made a big impact to me, it made me realized I have the capacity to do things like these. But school in china has been constantly fighting back, I literally did a gap year when China does not have gap year to just update Banana Shooter and focus on life. And I think its worth it.

2024

I stopped updating Banana Shooter starting this year, and people are mad about it. At this point the game little monetization system made about 30,000 USD, and theres also influencer promoting it. But I just moved on my new project. I spent a year to make my dream game which is similar to Rust and Tarkov, at the end, I learnt new stuff including modeling, texturing, animating, sfx, music production, game networking (client side prediction, c# low level programming).

This was also the year I realized how to maintain a game project in Unity, I was heavily influenced by a game studio called Facepunch.

But at the end of 2024, my dream game is just a simple terrain and road generator with little weapons and movement, essentials are done, gameplay are none.

2025

In short, I stopped my dream game development at mid 2025 after a vacation. I realized another program related to my dream game visuals, I need to understand how my game renders stuff. Otherwise I literally lose control over rendering completely. After some decision making, I decided to stop working on the game in Unity, and decide to make my own game engine for my game just like how Valve did with their game, where the engine can just be the game itself, so no useless features.

I chose Rust + Vulkan + Slang Shader for my game/engine, during the process I learnt so much more about graphics programming, multithreading, systems level programming and API design ergonomics. It was a blast and it was literally the most deep informational year for me.

2026

This is still unknown at the time of writing this (2026-09-27). My game/engine progress has been doing good, in just a year, I have implemented vulkan descriptor heap, GPU-Driven rendering, deferred visibility rendering, ray traced global illumination, screen space reflection and physically based rendering for literally everything (models, clouds, sky).

I have basically dedicated a year to just graphics programming, because its fun. But I also inherit my previous skills when developing this project, so stuff like game networking (this was designed with the engine) was enhanced and implemented in just 2 weeks with features like client side prediction which is something I dedicated half of my career on.

To be continued…