Show HN: Movie site built on a game engine

1 points by pbw 8 days ago · 0 comments · 2 min read

I'm an ex-gamedev (Guitar Hero) who built a movie website that looks like a Trello board. Each column can contain a different movie or cast member. Load pre-made boards or create your own by dragging and dropping between the columns. You can share boards with others.

For example, start with Quentin Tarantino’s movies in Column 1, put the cast of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in Column 2, then put Brad Pitt’s entire filmography in Column 3. Keep going as long as you want, building a "chain" ala Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

I was frustrated that all popular movie websites are page-oriented: one HTML page per movie or person. I asked myself what a movie site designed in 2026 would look like, in an era when full-screen canvas sites like Miro are common. And then asked what if the site was built on a game engine? I used PixiJS.

I ingested TMDB movie data into my own SQLite database head of time, so there are no external API calls at runtime. This was necessary because opening a board with 100's of columns would exceed rate limits. My read-only SQLite DB lives on a Fly volume, attached to my Fly machine. Most of the hard engineering was making the boards virtual, so we materialize only the columns currently visible. This keeps the site at 60Hz even on huge boards.

Some pre-made board:

2025 Oscar Winners: https://movie-chain.com/boards/oscars-2025

All of Christopher Nolan's movies: https://movie-chain.com/boards/christopher-nolan

Top movies of 1999: https://movie-chain.com/boards/top-rated-1999

Experience using Claude Code to build the site: https://tobeva.com/articles/chess-simul/

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