Alternatives
Products that do what A Dark Cave – Minimalistic Graphics in the Age of AI Slop does
Almost a year ago I started building A Dark Cave, a dark text-based browser game. The game intentionally avoids visuals and embraces minimalism. I use only text, symbols, and sounds to create atmosphere and spark the player's imagination. From time to time, I think about adding graphics to my game, since it is one of the most common requests I get from players. I even made a post about what I call the AI Slop Temptation: https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/1tcs8ou/... From the comments, it seems that players prefer no graphics at all over…
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Hi HN! I made many small web games in the past with Unity or Phaser. But this time I wanted to make something completely on my own. So I coded a basic game framework in plain JavaScript, and used it to make Almost Pong. This was a really fun project that taught me a lot about JavaScript, and I plan to make more minimalist games with this framework. Interesting fact: Almost Pong doesn't load any assets, all sprites and sounds are generated with code. Happy to answer questions, and please let me know if you have any feedback on the game. Thanks!
2022 · lessmilk.com
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2015 · twitchinstalls.com
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Hi HN ! This is an open source project I've been working on for a while. It's actually the third breakout-like game I've built. I really like the simplicity of the concept, having just one input (the puck horizontal position) and a simple gameplay that gives a low skill floor. My girlfriend and I played a lot of the excellent LBreakoutHD, an open source breakout game that follows the traditional formula of having multiple lives, scoring points by breaking bricks and catching the good upgrades that spawn randomly and fall down, while avoiding bad upgrades. She liked this game because it is…
2025 · breakout.lecaro.me
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I built this educational game to help people identify and understand dark patterns in digital products. It features 10 interactive scenarios based on real-world examples. The game includes: • Interactive pattern recognition scenarios • Explanations of psychological principles • Simulated real-world examples with guided feedback Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind. I'd especially appreciate feedback on the educational approach and scenario design.
2025 · games.productartistry.com
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Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
Jun 2026 · minigames.world
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2019 · darkpattern.games
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I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…
2022 · battle-of-flags.com
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Hey folks — here’s a small experiment I hacked together over the weekend: https://cleoselene.com/ In short, it’s a way to build multiplayer games with no client-side game logic. Everything is rendered on the server, and the game itself is written as simple Lua scripts. I built this to explore a few gamedev ideas I’ve been thinking about while working on Abstra: - Writing multiplayer games as if they were single-player (no client/server complexity) - Streaming game primitives instead of pixels, which should be much lighter - Server-side rendering makes cheating basically…
Jan 2026 · cleoselene.com
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I’ve been working on a puzzle game for a few years as a side project. The game is based on a small region of tiles in a grid that is mirrored, modified, and mirrored again. It’s based on a novel phenomenon I noticed where, once these mutations happen a few times, the original region can be hard to recognize. You have a feeling there are symmetries in the image, but they are just out of grasp. Going further, if only part of the region is visible, such as mirroring off the edge of the board, it adds to the feeling and it becomes a satisfying puzzle to solve. I originally published this on the…
2024 · hidden-mirrors.com
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I just released my latest Godot project, a rhythm-based dungeon crawler a la Crypt of the Necrodancer. The entire game plays out in 16 x 9 pixels because of a dare from my game dev group. I've open-sourced (MIT) the code and project files. Of course, the music files I don't own aren't included in the Github project, but I'm releasing the game's hand-crafted pixel sprites under CC0. The Github page also talks about some of the tricks you need to make the rhythm part of the game play nice with the dungeon crawling part.
2025 · github.com
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2018 · github.com
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Most games have limits. You can only use preset features, need coding for customization & adding mods, require expensive extra devices. We wanted to remove those barriers. That’s why we are building space zero—a browser based 3D world powered by AI. We plan to build players can freely mix items to generate unexpected creations with unique properties and sounds. Also the world itself is dynamically generated, evolving endlessly. I uploaded a demo version I’ve been working on for the past month! I hope to get any feedbacks or comments :)
2025 · 0.space
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Hi everybody. I occasionally make little browser-based games, and this is my latest attempt. It's not quite done, but it's quite playable (note: it does include audio): https://www.omiword.com/ This has been my occasional tinker target for ~5 years now, starting in the early days of Covid. The objective is to drag letter tiles within certain boundaries to spell four common American-English words. It hasn't got ads or anything, it's just supposed to be fun for its own sake. If people happen to like it, I might add an option for folks to make a small, one-time payment to unlock…
2025 · omiword.com
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Hi HN, I'm excited to share a project I've built: PixelateImage.org. Instead of being a traditional image editor, this is an *AI-powered tool that generates pixel art directly from your text prompts.* If you've ever wanted to create unique pixel art characters, scenes, or assets for games, art projects, or just for fun, but perhaps lacked the specific artistic skills or time, this might be for you. My goal was to make generating retro-style or modern pixel art more accessible. You can type in a description (e.g., "a brave knight in a dark forest," "a futuristic cityscape at night," "a cute…
2025 · pixelateimage.org
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I've been working for a while on trying to curate a game that has the emergence of procedurally generated computer games but that can be played with only pen and paper. Here I present the best version I've been able to come up with that is simple and emergent. I've really enjoyed being able to engage with this sort of game while not feeling like my brain in rotting. I recon my numeracy improves while playing it.
Jun 2026 · jameshylands.co.uk
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Built and open-sourced in the era before AI. I’m sure you know where to find the code.
Apr 2026 · mehuleo.github.io
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Hey all, just wanted to share a little game experiment. It's a rooms & keys kind of adventure with a lot of random deaths. It plays a Veo3-generated video in response to clicks, with Gemini used for coding. Prompting the videos was fun, but trying to vibe code everything was not. In the future I'll go back to using LLMs more sparingly for isolated functions, or at least try not to have it create anything that requires seeing the output to debug.
Oct 2025 · bemmu.com
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Hi HN! I made this project to indulge in some nostalgia for the Palm OS era. One of the hardest technical problems was fitting an entire replay’s worth of state into the URL fragment so games could be shared. I wrote up some of the details here: https://memalign.github.io/p/caveribbon.html
2024 · memalign.github.io
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