Mark Kern, a former Blizzard developer, says his team replaced Unreal Engine under Em-8ER with an AI-first engine and is developing 93 times faster. The AI game engine’s 93x figure comes from Kern and has not been independently benchmarked.
PC Gamer reports that Kern spent six months building the Kun-Zhi Engine for Em-8ER, a Firefall successor. Em-8ER’s official site describes the game as a Firefall successor with a public engine build chronicle. Kern says the engine was written mostly in C, with some Elixir, and runs on Vulkan. He also says AMD and Razer are current partners, although the report does not detail the terms of either relationship.
What is the AI game engine behind Em-8ER?
Kern describes Kun-Zhi as an engine built around AI-assisted development rather than an existing engine with AI tools added later. He says the team uses Codex, Grok and Claude in rotation, and has recently been using Astra.
The word “vibe” is doing some careful work here. Kern told PC Gamer that the process takes more than prompting: developers still need to understand game architecture, data structures and how to guide the AI. He describes coding as the drudge work, while the design decisions remain with the developer.
What does Kun-Zhi support?
The project’s latest update lists an advanced character animation system, world collision meshes, an AI-assisted Blender animation exporter, outfit swapping, physics-driven character effects, networked client/server player capsules and pilotable vehicles.
Em-8ER’s official site describes the game as a massive planetary war built around player-crafted mechs, kaiju invasions, resource gathering and 100-player PvE maps. Its build chronicle is intended to show the engine’s development history in public.
The project is still in development, and PC Gamer notes that the footage represents a hand-picked capture. The 93x figure is therefore a developer claim about production speed, not evidence that Kun-Zhi has outperformed Unreal in a controlled test. OpenAI’s Codex API work and recent attempts to bring neural rendering to existing games show why AI-assisted game development is attracting attention, but neither provides a direct comparison with this project.
What is Kun-Zhi Engine?
Kun-Zhi is the custom engine Mark Kern says his team built for Em-8ER. He describes it as an AI-first engine written mostly in C, with some Elixir, on Vulkan.
Who is developing the AI game engine?
Mark Kern, a former Blizzard developer who worked on vanilla World of Warcraft, is developing it for Em-8ER.
Has the 93x speed claim been independently tested?
No independent benchmark was identified. The 93x figure is Kern’s claim about his team’s development speed compared with its previous Unreal workflow.
