Nice. Added a PR for my dual-snake game - a game for the highly dextrous who finds juggling while riding a unicycle to be a trivial exercise. I grew up playing danmaku games [1] so the line between fun and frustration is very blurry to me.
I love making games! I've been building a no-code game engine by extracting reusable components each time I make a new game. Started as a way to scratch my own itch, now it's becoming a proper platform. A couple games I've shipped with it:
Each game I build adds to the component library: multiplayer, event systems, NPC behaviors, dialogues, etc... Currently working on a multiplayer Bomberman clone which is stress-testing the networking layer.
The engine/editor is at craftmygame.com if anyone wants to poke around!
The games seem fun, and your beta site looks fantastic. I'm always awed and humbled by folks who have the vision & spend the time to create something like this.
Is there any text based programming environment for it? the one thing game engines like unity or unreal get right IMO is having a pretty GUI for doing basic things and prototyping while still having the text based programming available to modify further
I don't know (I haven't used the editor, my work network blocks domains with "game" in it) but in most of the "no code" solutions I've tried it's simply faster to define things in text than to try and figure out how to represent that with the graphical tools given. It also allows for code to be transferred between projects easier
Some things RPG Maker can't really do: real-time multiplayer (works out of the box), web-native games (just share a link), and you're not locked to RPGs - platformers, survival, racing, top-down action all work too!
Very cool! Opened a PR to add my local multiplayer game platform, Gaming Couch (https://gamingcouch.com), to the list of games :) Just recently posted a ShowHN post about it which hit the front page and generated so much great feedback and discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344573
In a nutshell its a web-based game platform where up to 8 players use their smartphones as controllers to play real-time action mini-games on a central browser screen. It takes a lot of inspiration from classic party games like Jackbox, Mario Party and Mario Kart.
Fantastic idea! I didn't see my https://words.zip game here so I'll submit it, even though it didn't get mucht traction on HN - it's up to 288,000 words found now!
Just a thought, maybe a "tunnel vision" mask toggle? So I can focus on the center of the screen without all the peripheral noise. It doesn't have to be a significant loss, but dark edges and corners with a nice fade to the visible circle in the center. Whatever that equates to..
Oh that's not a bad idea, and easy enough to implement! I'll definitely get to it later today - I think because I play it on my phone the contrast is less obtrusive, but on a big desktop screen it's a bit boggling to look at
Both were pretty well received here on HN. The second one is more popular one among the two with about 90 unique visitors per day on an average, as far as I can tell from the access logs after filtering out bots and scrapers. The first one has about 10 unique visitors per day. Really tiny numbers, but it's a delight that some people out there return to this game regularly. Thank you, whoever you are.
Playing computer games is how I was introduced to computers. I too wanted to develop my own invaders-like game when I was about 8 years old. Unfortunately, I neither had enough access to computers nor sufficient programming skills at the time. The first link (invaders.html) is the result of fulfilling that childhood dream 30 years later.
Inspired by a few computer games from the early 1980s, the first game also includes an autoplay algorithm. If you leave the game idle for 5 seconds after loading, the autoplayer kicks in and starts playing the game automatically.
Each game is implemented in plain HTML and JavaScript as a single, unminified, easily readable HTML page. Anyone can download the page, save it locally, play it offline as well as inspect or tweak the source code.
Fun idea! I am glad there seems to be a community of people enjoying word games on HN, it tends to be the first place I post my games. https://squareword.org (wordle meets sudoku) and https://clickword.org (scrabble meets tetris... ish) are the largest so far.
I think https://videopuzzle.org has a lot of potential also, but it targets an audience that's a bit different as it is more visual, focused on reassembling videos like a puzzle.
This is great. Thank you for building and sharing it.
May I request you to consider moving this project to a community organisation like https://github.com/<your-new-org> so that we, the HN folks, can maintain it as a community? Curated list projects often start with a lot of enthusiasm and I follow several similar ones focused on personal websites and blogs. While some of the curators remain active and maintain their project even years later, some do not. This isn't a complaint. I know life happens and circumstances change. So it is understandable that some of these projects become inactive later.
But it becomes a little problematic when someone wants to have their creation added to the curated list but cannot do so because the maintainer is no longer active. Of course, volunteers can fork the project and maintain it as a community but this is easier said than done. Once a 'Show HN' thread like this becomes successful, future visitors are more likely to end up on the original but no-longer-maintained curated list than the newer community maintained fork. For that reason, when I created my list of curated personal websites, I did so under the organisation <https://github.com/hnpwd> from the very start, and now we have multiple maintainers and contributors helping out with the curation.
Hosting the project under a community org with multiple maintainers could give it a better chance of staying active in the long term. This is only a request. I do not mean to impose or pressure you in any way. Please feel free to ignore the suggestion and thank you again for the work regardless.
Most of the "Awesome XXX" lists are designed solely to promote their creators pet project.
You can see the gaming happen early on in many of these lists, where commercial things start appearing quite highly, or weirdly the project get sponsored.
Once they get popular the creators abandon them and start ignoring the updates/PRs because their task of feeding traffic to their personal projects has been accomplished.
The org should also curate selections. Particularly only games that have been well received in past HN discussions, and if they have, the org might add them to the directory.
For a little while recently I did a weekly vibe game jam for myself using TIC-80 and Claude Code and had the best time.
I actually went to college for game development but never really built any games for myself because the time investment was just too large and the payoff too small. I really think that agent-driven development is the way for games, especially small games and to prototype gameplay mechanics. You no longer have to worry about how to factor your codebase when you just want to see if some idea works. This is especially the case when you put yourself in the constraints of a little virtual machine where you don't have to care much about assets, which are now definitely the bottleneck for this kind of thing.
These games are all unfinished, riddled with bugs, and almost none of them are actually fun (I like Traffic and Shapeship the most) but the thing is that I absolutely loved making them in a way that I haven't enjoyed making anything on a computer in a long while. It was so exciting to see doors that I felt were long since closed to me be blown wide open by agentic development.
It's still very much a work in progress, with just two games. One is a version of the classic game "Lemmings". The other is a very minimal asteroids style inertial ship duel.
The games both use deterministic execution in lockstep across network participants, and provide interactive gameplay and smooth execution even if situations with up to quarter or half second lag times, and the methods used for this are then perhaps one interesting aspect of the project.
In each game, the local player sees their own controlled entities at current positions, and other player entities at historical positions.
In the lemmings game, the complication is that lemmings depend on their own world changes (e.g. they need to stand on a bridge piece they just built). So there is a kind of fork and merge mechanism that enables local and remote world changes to be eventually consistent.
In the inertial duel game, homing missiles have a deploy phase in which they transition between different update time frames, with exactly the same sequence of updates applied on each machine, but with these updates accelerated or slowed down to achieve the time frame synchronisation.
There is an offline part with a tutorial to go through for the lemmings clone, which gives a flavour of the thing. The networking part uses a dedicated server and is currently invite only, but if anyone is interested in trying this then please shout and I can send out server credentials..
Agreed. (someone else mentioned sorting by upvotes, which I like too) Also a thumbnail (or gif), just a way to convey more information about the game more quickly.
Nice concept. One question: was the data generated by an LLM? Don't mean this in a snarky way. The Lichess entry links to a non-existent HN thread[1], and "Show HN: Lichess" does not appear in HN search results. I found a hit for a Lichess client written in Elisp[2]. At least I discovered a cool piece of software.
Items that were found by "HN scraper" have working Show HN links. The rest for whatever reason have a non-working link. Probably more likely that the code was generated by LLM and is full of bugs.
This is great! Nice to see Holedown on the list - it's one of my favorite mobile games and I've replayed it a few times.
I'm also working on a new game at the moment. I have no idea how long it will take since I'm having too much fun coming up with new ideas and adding new levelsm but I'll definitely submit it here once I launch it.
Does it have to be submitted to HN before? I made Multi-Animal Spree Popper - game about popping animals for iOS (https://maspgame.com/) but never posted here for fear of being seen as spam. I ofc am considering rewriting in Rust to make it more palatable.
Please show the game list in random order, or starting in a random position. Just to promote the discovery of the games later in the alphabet. (Or end up with games called ______11_roguexxx, lol)
I strongly disagree with that. It's so irritating as a user when sites have a random ordering to things. I can envision a "random" button being useful, but not having a random order to the list.
Indeed. This is precisely what we did for the HN Personal Websites Directory at <https://hnpwd.github.io/>. The website info cards are shown in random order, with the ordering reshuffled every hour.
I am not a professional web developer but I have been using JavaScript since 2001 or so. It is only this month that I realised JavaScript does not have a way to seed the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). So there was no way to do something like:
srand(Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000 / 3600))
As a result, I had to implement a linear congruential generator (LCG) based on the Knuth parameters: <https://github.com/hnpwd/hnpwd/blob/1e513b1/web/script.js>. When I first came across the LCG algorithm (in K&R with different parameters) in the early 2000s, I felt it was neat but assumed I would never need it, since almost every mainstream language comes with a reasonable PRNG. Little did I know back then that the most ubiquitous language on the web would make that old knowledge useful again, some 25 years later.
Nice! There are some great games on HN, but it’s difficult to catch them all. Shout out to the creator of enclose.horse, I’ve been playing this every day since I saw it on HN.
enclose.horse is fun, I wish they removed all the clearly fake high-scores though. It would be a lot more interesting to see the actual score distribution rather than thousands of points on a level where the perfect score is 50.
Unfortunately gaming and cheating go hand in hand. I haven't seen a level with thousands of points yet but every time a suspiciously high number of perfect scores.
Nice, except, first game I clicked is now only pay-to-play on major platforms. I'm not against that, but it doesn't feel like a Show HN game anymore which I kind of expect to be a little rough and ready and certainly free to play. Perhaps this could be noted in the listing? I mean it's a success for the developer, not a downside. Game was Holedown.
Nice. Added a PR for my dual-snake game - a game for the highly dextrous who finds juggling while riding a unicycle to be a trivial exercise. I grew up playing danmaku games [1] so the line between fun and frustration is very blurry to me.
https://mordenstar.com/projects/twins-of-caduceus
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_hell
I love making games! I've been building a no-code game engine by extracting reusable components each time I make a new game. Started as a way to scratch my own itch, now it's becoming a proper platform. A couple games I've shipped with it:
- https://craftmygame.com/game/e310c6fcd8f4448f9dc67aac/r/play
- https://craftmygame.com/game/f977040308d84f41b615244b/r/play
Each game I build adds to the component library: multiplayer, event systems, NPC behaviors, dialogues, etc... Currently working on a multiplayer Bomberman clone which is stress-testing the networking layer.
The engine/editor is at craftmygame.com if anyone wants to poke around!
The games seem fun, and your beta site looks fantastic. I'm always awed and humbled by folks who have the vision & spend the time to create something like this.
Thanks! Still early days but it's been fun building. Happy to help if you ever want to try making something with it
Is there any text based programming environment for it? the one thing game engines like unity or unreal get right IMO is having a pretty GUI for doing basic things and prototyping while still having the text based programming available to modify further
Not yet - the no-code approach is intentional. One of my main targets is non-technical people or who want a quick prototype of their ideas.
Text-based scripting adds complexity and security concerns I'd rather avoid for now.
That said, if users start asking for it, I'll reconsider.
What would you want to do with code that feels limited in the visual editor?
I don't know (I haven't used the editor, my work network blocks domains with "game" in it) but in most of the "no code" solutions I've tried it's simply faster to define things in text than to try and figure out how to represent that with the graphical tools given. It also allows for code to be transferred between projects easier
I’ve been playing with it in the last few days and really like UI, feels much more modern than rpg maker!
Thanks! What are you building?
Some things RPG Maker can't really do: real-time multiplayer (works out of the box), web-native games (just share a link), and you're not locked to RPGs - platformers, survival, racing, top-down action all work too!
Very cool! Opened a PR to add my local multiplayer game platform, Gaming Couch (https://gamingcouch.com), to the list of games :) Just recently posted a ShowHN post about it which hit the front page and generated so much great feedback and discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344573
In a nutshell its a web-based game platform where up to 8 players use their smartphones as controllers to play real-time action mini-games on a central browser screen. It takes a lot of inspiration from classic party games like Jackbox, Mario Party and Mario Kart.
Enclose horse is probably my favourite game of all time. There’s just something about enclosing horses.
Same here! Still on a streak since day one
Fantastic idea! I didn't see my https://words.zip game here so I'll submit it, even though it didn't get mucht traction on HN - it's up to 288,000 words found now!
I like the idea, but the UI gives me a headache, especially when the "found words" are still loading. I think it might have to do with the contrast?
If relevant, I'm loading the website on a 27" IPS display under normal daylight conditions.
Thanks for the feedback, I've heard similar before and meant to make a lower contrast option - I'll definitely get on it.
Just a thought, maybe a "tunnel vision" mask toggle? So I can focus on the center of the screen without all the peripheral noise. It doesn't have to be a significant loss, but dark edges and corners with a nice fade to the visible circle in the center. Whatever that equates to..
Oh that's not a bad idea, and easy enough to implement! I'll definitely get to it later today - I think because I play it on my phone the contrast is less obtrusive, but on a big desktop screen it's a bit boggling to look at
This explains the unusually large amount of traffic my game is getting today.
Wasn't 2048 first posted on HN before it got big?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566
:)
Thanks! Massive list of related threads as of Oct 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41938249
Submitted my only two rather humble attempts at games:
https://susam.net/invaders.html
https://susam.net/myrgb.html
Both were pretty well received here on HN. The second one is more popular one among the two with about 90 unique visitors per day on an average, as far as I can tell from the access logs after filtering out bots and scrapers. The first one has about 10 unique visitors per day. Really tiny numbers, but it's a delight that some people out there return to this game regularly. Thank you, whoever you are.
Playing computer games is how I was introduced to computers. I too wanted to develop my own invaders-like game when I was about 8 years old. Unfortunately, I neither had enough access to computers nor sufficient programming skills at the time. The first link (invaders.html) is the result of fulfilling that childhood dream 30 years later.
Inspired by a few computer games from the early 1980s, the first game also includes an autoplay algorithm. If you leave the game idle for 5 seconds after loading, the autoplayer kicks in and starts playing the game automatically.
Each game is implemented in plain HTML and JavaScript as a single, unminified, easily readable HTML page. Anyone can download the page, save it locally, play it offline as well as inspect or tweak the source code.
Fun idea! I am glad there seems to be a community of people enjoying word games on HN, it tends to be the first place I post my games. https://squareword.org (wordle meets sudoku) and https://clickword.org (scrabble meets tetris... ish) are the largest so far.
I think https://videopuzzle.org has a lot of potential also, but it targets an audience that's a bit different as it is more visual, focused on reassembling videos like a puzzle.
Will post these to the arcade! :)
The list of submissions that haven't yet been added are here:
https://github.com/andrewgy8/hnarcade/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...
This is great. Thank you for building and sharing it.
May I request you to consider moving this project to a community organisation like https://github.com/<your-new-org> so that we, the HN folks, can maintain it as a community? Curated list projects often start with a lot of enthusiasm and I follow several similar ones focused on personal websites and blogs. While some of the curators remain active and maintain their project even years later, some do not. This isn't a complaint. I know life happens and circumstances change. So it is understandable that some of these projects become inactive later.
But it becomes a little problematic when someone wants to have their creation added to the curated list but cannot do so because the maintainer is no longer active. Of course, volunteers can fork the project and maintain it as a community but this is easier said than done. Once a 'Show HN' thread like this becomes successful, future visitors are more likely to end up on the original but no-longer-maintained curated list than the newer community maintained fork. For that reason, when I created my list of curated personal websites, I did so under the organisation <https://github.com/hnpwd> from the very start, and now we have multiple maintainers and contributors helping out with the curation.
Hosting the project under a community org with multiple maintainers could give it a better chance of staying active in the long term. This is only a request. I do not mean to impose or pressure you in any way. Please feel free to ignore the suggestion and thank you again for the work regardless.
Most of the "Awesome XXX" lists are designed solely to promote their creators pet project.
You can see the gaming happen early on in many of these lists, where commercial things start appearing quite highly, or weirdly the project get sponsored.
Once they get popular the creators abandon them and start ignoring the updates/PRs because their task of feeding traffic to their personal projects has been accomplished.
The org should also curate selections. Particularly only games that have been well received in past HN discussions, and if they have, the org might add them to the directory.
> multiple maintainers and contributors
This is important but seems orthogonal to whether or not the repo is under an org.
For a little while recently I did a weekly vibe game jam for myself using TIC-80 and Claude Code and had the best time.
I actually went to college for game development but never really built any games for myself because the time investment was just too large and the payoff too small. I really think that agent-driven development is the way for games, especially small games and to prototype gameplay mechanics. You no longer have to worry about how to factor your codebase when you just want to see if some idea works. This is especially the case when you put yourself in the constraints of a little virtual machine where you don't have to care much about assets, which are now definitely the bottleneck for this kind of thing.
These games are all unfinished, riddled with bugs, and almost none of them are actually fun (I like Traffic and Shapeship the most) but the thing is that I absolutely loved making them in a way that I haven't enjoyed making anything on a computer in a long while. It was so exciting to see doors that I felt were long since closed to me be blown wide open by agentic development.
https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/07-tic80/
https://redfloatplane.lol/arcade/
Cool project!
I'm building something quite similar at https://hn-games.marcolabarile.me/
I manually curate the data and add images too. Code and data are open: https://github.com/labarilem/hn-games
I've posted this project some time ago to HN but it didn't get much attention unfortunately.
NOTE: Data includes games up to April 2024, I add more games when I have some spare time and plan to catch up to today's games asap.
I'm working on a game arcade thing as a hobby project, themed around lockstep networking.
There's a website for this here: https://locksteparcade.com/
It's still very much a work in progress, with just two games. One is a version of the classic game "Lemmings". The other is a very minimal asteroids style inertial ship duel.
The games both use deterministic execution in lockstep across network participants, and provide interactive gameplay and smooth execution even if situations with up to quarter or half second lag times, and the methods used for this are then perhaps one interesting aspect of the project.
In each game, the local player sees their own controlled entities at current positions, and other player entities at historical positions.
In the lemmings game, the complication is that lemmings depend on their own world changes (e.g. they need to stand on a bridge piece they just built). So there is a kind of fork and merge mechanism that enables local and remote world changes to be eventually consistent.
In the inertial duel game, homing missiles have a deploy phase in which they transition between different update time frames, with exactly the same sequence of updates applied on each machine, but with these updates accelerated or slowed down to achieve the time frame synchronisation.
There is an offline part with a tutorial to go through for the lemmings clone, which gives a flavour of the thing. The networking part uses a dedicated server and is currently invite only, but if anyone is interested in trying this then please shout and I can send out server credentials..
Is there a way to see the most popular / highest voted ones? If every submission makes it to the list it will collect lots of clutter.
Agreed. (someone else mentioned sorting by upvotes, which I like too) Also a thumbnail (or gif), just a way to convey more information about the game more quickly.
Great idea!
Please check my HTML5 3D racing game :), it's an Arcade racer with dreamcast / PSX aesthetics and async multiplayer.
https://gamesnacks.com/games/52v00umba6lko#eids=95379098&sc=...
Nice concept. One question: was the data generated by an LLM? Don't mean this in a snarky way. The Lichess entry links to a non-existent HN thread[1], and "Show HN: Lichess" does not appear in HN search results. I found a hit for a Lichess client written in Elisp[2]. At least I discovered a cool piece of software.
[1] https://andrewgy8.github.io/hnarcade/games/games/lichess
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779861
(Not OP) I don't think so, you can find the scraping code here: https://github.com/andrewgy8/hnarcade/blob/main/scripts/scra...
Items that were found by "HN scraper" have working Show HN links. The rest for whatever reason have a non-working link. Probably more likely that the code was generated by LLM and is full of bugs.
Wow! What a coincidence. I just launched this y'day - https://cric26.fun/
I tried to go for deep cricket-ing gameplay and not graphics. People from the subcontinent should be able to enjoy it.
From reading the comments here, it looks like the arcade will soon double in size.
(I too added one, https://mooncraft2000.com which I posted to HN some years ago. I should add https://kardland.com but I don't think I ever did a ShowHN for it.)
This is great! Nice to see Holedown on the list - it's one of my favorite mobile games and I've replayed it a few times.
I'm also working on a new game at the moment. I have no idea how long it will take since I'm having too much fun coming up with new ideas and adding new levelsm but I'll definitely submit it here once I launch it.
Thank you for sharing! I like the idea, I feel there is some work ahead so I could find it useful.
I opened that to see what are the most recommended games on the Hacker News (and perhaps posts introducing these, notes by authors, discussions).
Yet, I got alphabetic sorting. (Good for librarians, the worst possible for actual recommendations.)
How about: sorting some by upvotes and linking posts (with dates) when it was mentioned?
Also, if there is a game, instead of card with names, cards with screenshots would be infinitely better.
Does it have to be submitted to HN before? I made Multi-Animal Spree Popper - game about popping animals for iOS (https://maspgame.com/) but never posted here for fear of being seen as spam. I ofc am considering rewriting in Rust to make it more palatable.
First item I clicked: github link is 404, HN thread goes to wrong comment. The game link itself works though!
https://andrewgy8.github.io/hnarcade/games/games/sandspiel
Smart idea! Some curated graphics for each game in the preview cards would really enhance this. Nice "retro orange" on the landing :)
Thanks! It's in the works as well as screen shots
Thanks. I have submitted my platformer "Interplanetary Postal Service" [0]. This is a lunar lander type game with real computational fluid dynamics.
[0] https://github.com/s-macke/Interplanetary-Postal-Service
Please show the game list in random order, or starting in a random position. Just to promote the discovery of the games later in the alphabet. (Or end up with games called ______11_roguexxx, lol)
I strongly disagree with that. It's so irritating as a user when sites have a random ordering to things. I can envision a "random" button being useful, but not having a random order to the list.
Indeed. This is precisely what we did for the HN Personal Websites Directory at <https://hnpwd.github.io/>. The website info cards are shown in random order, with the ordering reshuffled every hour.
I am not a professional web developer but I have been using JavaScript since 2001 or so. It is only this month that I realised JavaScript does not have a way to seed the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). So there was no way to do something like:
As a result, I had to implement a linear congruential generator (LCG) based on the Knuth parameters: <https://github.com/hnpwd/hnpwd/blob/1e513b1/web/script.js>. When I first came across the LCG algorithm (in K&R with different parameters) in the early 2000s, I felt it was neat but assumed I would never need it, since almost every mainstream language comes with a reasonable PRNG. Little did I know back then that the most ubiquitous language on the web would make that old knowledge useful again, some 25 years later.Great sales pitch, I'm guilty of fomo and added my stuff, kudos.
Thanks a lot for this, what a great idea!
I've submitted Botnet of Ares [0], my hacking simulator.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/
Added mine ... let's see... https://foximax.com (word puzzle)
Nice! I wanted to do the same, but wanted to do youtube videos first https://eamag.me/2026/Best-HackerNews-Videos
Code: https://github.com/andrewgy8/hnarcade
Just submitted https://migo.games/arrow (a multiplayer arrow shooting game)
Nice! There are some great games on HN, but it’s difficult to catch them all. Shout out to the creator of enclose.horse, I’ve been playing this every day since I saw it on HN.
Haha! Yeah that game is what wanted me to build this site :)
enclose.horse is fun, I wish they removed all the clearly fake high-scores though. It would be a lot more interesting to see the actual score distribution rather than thousands of points on a level where the perfect score is 50.
Unfortunately gaming and cheating go hand in hand. I haven't seen a level with thousands of points yet but every time a suspiciously high number of perfect scores.
Very nice! Like it a lot.
One idea: could you sort it by upvotes as well?
Nice idea! It would also nice to have a similar post about consoles or game devices discovered through HN.
These kinds of posts are what HN is all about.
Nice, except, first game I clicked is now only pay-to-play on major platforms. I'm not against that, but it doesn't feel like a Show HN game anymore which I kind of expect to be a little rough and ready and certainly free to play. Perhaps this could be noted in the listing? I mean it's a success for the developer, not a downside. Game was Holedown.
Doesn't the 'paid' tag under the game description already address this concern?
very cool!