Show HN: I built a refinery simulator game to explain job to my kids

📰 Hacker News · fuelingcurious

Hi HN, I’m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game. Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU . I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay. I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied heavily on LLMs (Claude, Copilot, Gemini) to help write the code. What started as a simple concept turned into a 9,000-line single-page app built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I used Matter.js for the 2D physics minigames. A few technical takeaways from building this as a non-dev: * Managing the LLM workflow: Once the script.js file got large, letting the models output full file rewri

Published 11 Mar 2026
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