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24 alternatives to A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

My background project for the last two years has been re-implementing my 2004 C++ shoot'em up game in TypeScript + WebGL, and it's finally done (just in time for the 20th anniversary!) Play the game online: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/darklaga.html Technical article about the remake: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/remake.html I have tested Firefox, Chrome and Edge on desktop and mobile (no access to a device capable of running Safari). It's amazing how much difference 20 years makes: the hardware is so much more powerful, the web…

Dark Laga is a shoot-em-up game originally created in 2004 for PDA devices, now rebuilt in TypeScript and WebGL for modern browsers. The remake runs on desktop and mobile versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Edge. Players… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A remake of my 2004 PDA video game launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1IM

    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 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…

    2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    I'm a Unity 3D refugee, certified expert, started in 2005 when it was a two man-band with Joachim and David. I've been lucky enough to make a good living out of Unity with my own consultancy over the years making data visualisation applications (Wind Energy) and innovation projects (Visualising accounting data for Wolters Kluwer etc.). Godot is pretty amazing in my opinion. Wrote this game over a few days and was productive in Godot basically instantly. I couldn't get up and running in Unreal despite trying a few times. It's my ambition to start a niche agency developing 80's style games of…

    2023 · lfgslots.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5IR

    After 25 years of writing software, I was feeling nostalgic for the kinds of things that got me into programming in the first place: the old DOS demoscene. I spent a weekend seeing if I could recapture some of that INT 13H VGA magic using today's web tech, but with the old-school constraints of doing it from scratch. The result is this portfolio of ten classic effects running in a single HTML file. It's all vanilla JavaScript writing to a element, with no external libraries. It was a fun challenge to implement things like: * The color palette cycling and smooth fading in the Plasma demo. *…

    2025 · jdfio.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6IB

    I've been working on an MMORPG that is now in alpha as a solo developer. Here are the major open source technologies that I use: Blender - 3D modeling software for creating the overall environment and every game object. I've gotten a lot of CC and Public Domain assets from https://poly.pizza GLTF - I export assets from blender to the GLTF asset format JSON - I write a JSON config for every game object that describes things like its name, its interactions, its collisions, etc. Node.js exporter - I iterate over the environment and every asset to create a scene hierarchy. I use…

    2024 · alpha.reconquer.online · its alternatives →

  7. 7IM

    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 · its alternatives →

  8. 8MA

    hi all, I've always wanted to make my own game, but couldn't afford a thousand-dollar adobe (flash+photoshop) license. I'm not a talented programmer, have no degree in CS. But I understand some elements of design. So I got me a copy of ImpactJS, and after about 5 months of steep learning curve (at least for me), I managed to come up with a game. I also integrated it with a highscore and badge system, similar to what you get at Kongregate. You need to login with Google/OpenID to earn badges/scores. link is: http://www.hotbazooka.com/privatejoe hope to hear some feedback/questions from you guys!

    2011 · hotbazooka.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9MP

    I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…

    2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I'm making a platform for simple open source games you can play anywhere. Games are all just JavaScript classes and you can read the source of every game on the platform. I started working on initial "games" (mostly rendering tests) in 2018 and eventually built all of the platform stuff around it to make it easy to share games. There's also an in-browser editor available for you to make and publish games all from the browser. Would love some feedback on the games and studio features as well as the platform overall. All of the code is available at https://github.com/homegamesio

    Jul 2026 · homegames.io · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    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 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I love making small 2D pixel art games, especially using tools that have some constraints. Things like Pico-8 and the Playdate SDK are simple, fun, and allow for focusing on the game idea rather than the technical minutia. Years ago I prototyped an idea for this little game engine, Usagi, but used Rhai instead of Lua. The idea for this little game engine never went away, so I decided to finally dig in and build it. Today I released v1.0.0 of Usagi Engine after making a bunch of small games, getting feedback from developers, and stabilizing the API. It's simple, has a great developer…

    May 2026 · usagiengine.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    So, after years of abandoning Rust after the hello world stage, I finally decided to do something substantial. It started with simple line rendering, but I liked how it was progressing so I figured I could make a reasonably complete PSX style renderer and a game with it. My only dependency is SDL2; I treat it as my "platform", so it handles windowing, input and audio. This means my Cargo.toml is as simple as: [dependencies.sdl2] version = "0.35" default-features = false features = ["mixer"] this pulls around 6-7 other dependencies. I am doing actual true color 3D rendering (with Z buffer,…

    2025 · totenarctanz.itch.io · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    A liminal brush-based CSG editor and game engine with unified (forward) renderer inspired by Radiant and Worldcraft/Hammer Compact and lightweight (target: Snapdragon 8CX, OpenGL 3.3) Real-time lighting with stencil shadows without the need for pre-baked compilation

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hello HN, Just wanted to show this little 2D game engine that I've been working on for some time (around 2 years on the editor part, longer on some of the components). It's quite full featured but obviously this a project of such magnitude already that the work never really ends. That being said it's definitely already at a point where games can made and published. The editor runs natively on Windows and Linux using Qt5. The games can run on both Win and Linux as well as on WASM with WebGL. Feature wise there's a bunch of the stuff you'd expect. Audio, graphics, scripting,…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hi HN! I built a 3D arcade racing game in HTML5 using PlayCanvas. It features arcade-style physics inspired by OutRun, with PS1/Dreamcast-style graphics. The multiplayer is asynchronous: you race against the “ghosts” (replays) of up to 7 other players, and after finishing a run you can share a link with a friend so they can race your ghost 1v1. The game currently has 20 tracks, plus a “daily challenge” mode with procedurally generated tracks. We’ve tested it on both desktop and mobile. It supports touch and keyboard controls, though I personally prefer playing with a keyboard in…

    2020 · gamesnacks.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hello HN, I'm sharing a little open-source utility I wrote recently. I'm a huge fan of Brendan Gregg's "BPF Performance Tools" book. However, every time I SSH into a fresh server, most of the diagnostic tools aren't installed there and installing them can be really annoying. I decided to use Nix package manager and LLMs to make this process straightforward. My utility first downloads a "toolbox" of Linux utilities (built with Nix), runs Brendan Gregg's famous "60-second Linux analysis" playbook and then summarizes the results with an LLM. So "60-second Linux analysis" now becomes a single…

    Mar 2026 · quesma.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi HN, When browsers killed NPAPI plugin support, thousands of early 2000s web games were effectively lost to time. Macromedia Shockwave, in particular, was a closed-source, highly complex, and largely undocumented beast. So a few friends and I spent the last two years doing something arguably unhinged: rebuilding the entire Director engine from scratch. Today, we're finally sharing dirplayer-rs. Repo: https://github.com/igorlira/dirplayer-rs We intentionally stayed quiet on this until we had undeniable proof that it was actually possible. With our latest v0.4.1 release,…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19AF

    Atlas Fury is an action game for mobile devices. I wanted to create a game I would play wherever I go that was inspired by Tyrian from the 90s. It's a time waster, but eh what arcade game wasn't a time waster? This is the first time I've created a game with Godot. On mobile no less which has it's fair share of issues. For example, iOS runs slower than Android. I'm not complaining, I profiled and targeted some older devices approx. 4-7 years ago, so far so good.

    2024 · its alternatives →

  20. 20
  21. 21WM

    Just launched a very early beta of a multiplayer "FPS" made in WebGL using ThreeJS library. (possible to switch between FPS and 3rd person) Just a hobby project that I would love to get some feedback on, in order to see if I should continue working on it or not. Note; It will add the project to github as open source once I've spent some time cleaning up the code. URL: http://wizardwarz.nergal.se

    2014 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi HN! This is my first game — something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a small browser game built with Phaser 3, React, and the phaser template (https://github.com/phaserjs/template-react-ts/). I made it in 2 days (like 8 hours in total real time) using gemini-cli. About 90% of the code was generated with AI, but I learned a lot by making fine tweaks. It only works on PC since it’s a typical WASD + R (reload) shooter. I’d love feedback on: - Gameplay (is it fun, too hard?) - Ideas for new features Thanks in advance! ps: I used cubes as a prototype, but now I kind of…

    2025 · cubic-zombies.pages.dev · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I had a dream on Nov 21, 2019 of a game. I woke up at 4:00pm that day, started programming it then, and 7 and 1/2 hours later, it was done. It's about you and a pink square going exploring. - otdav33/spelunko

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    My wife and I recently submitted to a mobile game jam on Newgrounds (yes, it's still around). What started as a question of whether we could do it somehow morphed into whether we could do without so many of the seemingly needless complications rampant in our respective industries. My wife thus did all the art as traditional frame-by-frame animation (no puppets or tweening) and I preceded without a game engine. I did use a pre-processor that gives JS a Lisp syntax (Parenscript), because C-syntax is gross. We hope the end result, while definitely of small scope, will serve to inspire some…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

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