Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

This tutorial series teaches developers how to build a 2D game engine using Go and OpenGL. Based on the creator's personal hobby project, it covers foundational concepts through hands-on instruction. The series… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A tutorial for building a 2D game engine with Go and OpenGL launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1. 1
   I wrote my own RTS game engine in C▲1,102

   An OpenGL RTS game engine written in C. Contribute to eduard-permyakov/permafrost-engine development by creating an account on GitHub.

   2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

2. 2
   Generative Art in Go▲115

   Learn the basics of algorithmic art with the Go language

   2021 · p5v.gumroad.com · its alternatives →

3. 3
   A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify▲616

   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 →

4. 4
   2D Game engine and editor for Windows and Linux▲121

   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 →

5. 5
   A 2D game engine in under 1000 lines of C▲98

   A top-down 2d game engine, written from scratch in under 1000 lines of C. Development of the game based on this engine is streamed on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ryanpcmcquen - ryanpcmcquen/basque

   2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

6. 6IB
   I built an indie, browser-based MMORPG▲340

   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. 7
   Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games▲337

   I’ve been working on this for about a year through four major rewrites. Godogen is a pipeline that takes a text prompt, designs the architecture, generates 2D/3D assets, writes the GDScript, and tests it visually. The output is a complete, playable Godot 4 project. Getting LLMs to reliably generate functional games required solving three specific engineering bottlenecks: 1. The Training Data Scarcity: LLMs barely know GDScript. It has ~850 classes and a Python-like syntax that will happily let a model hallucinate Python idioms that fail to compile. To fix this, I built a custom…

   Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

8. 8
   Homegames. An open-source game platform I've been making for 8 years▲229

   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 →

9. 9IC
   I co-wrote a book on training Deep Learning models in Go▲45

   A friend and I wrote a book on how to build and train Deep Learning models in Go. We wanted it to be a useful reference for deep learning basics for Go programmers. Deep Learning is slowly seeping into everything we use every day and we thought it would be great if more people could do it in Go. The book is available here and on Amazon as well. https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/hands-deep-learning-go We would appreciate any feedback and we're always looking to improve.

   2019 · its alternatives →

10. 10
    I built a multiplayer voxel browser game engine▲236

    I open sourced my HTML5 multiplayer 3D voxel browser game engine.

    2023 · kevzettler.com · its alternatives →

11. 11
    Game of Life on non-square topologies with 2^32 update rules▲69

    Hi HN, when learning Golang (and topology), I ported a simple GOL in C (https://github.com/Jeadie/GoL) into Go. I then added a bunch of features - Playing on other fundamental polygons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_polygon#Examples_o...) - Considering all possible update rules (of which, there are many). Looking to get back to this project soon. Would love some feedback + ideas.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

12. 12OS
    Open-source Android game written in Go▲12

    Hi HN! So this all started out as an experiment. I wanted to test the Golang gomobile library to build a small app on Android in Go. And it turned out to be a game, and harder than I thought... After a lot of work and many gotchas (and a lot of moments where I was about to give up and started to squint on Unity) I finally manage to create a working game for Android with Go. The game is quite simple and if it wasn't for being written in OpenGL/OpenAL from scratch it would be quite simple to make it in Unity or any other game engine for that matter. Another goal of my project was actually…

    2022 · its alternatives →

13. 13IM
    I made a 2D game engine in Dart▲98

    A 2D Game Engine for Dart.

    2025 · bullseye2d.org · its alternatives →

14. 14
    1M+ animated GPU sprites in JavaScript▲27

    We added a new feature to our open-source HTML5 game engine today that allows you to create Sprite GPU Layers. These pack together simple JS object definitions onto the GPU and renders them using a custom vertex shader. This skips all CPU computation and GPU upload operations, resulting in vastly increased performance. For objects that don't need to be updated by input, physics, or other interactive behaviors, we found it to be a great solution. In testing, we've easily managed to blast millions of sprites around on moderate desktop-grade GPUs. Indeed, we hit the fill rate limitation of the…

    2025 · phaser.io · its alternatives →

15. 15MP
    My platforming game written in C 89▲127

    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 →

16. 16AR
    A rudimentary game engine to build four dimensional VR evironments▲39

    I think it's finally time to lock version 0.2 of my 4d side project. (Since previous Show HN a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100760 I scrapped lots of stuff and concentrated on making a javascript "game engine") The sole purpose of this project is to explore whether it's possible to make the human brain spatially aware of four dimensions using Virtual Reality. It’s my first ever game project, my first time using Unity, first time writing C#, and my first anything with WebXR, so please be gentle! To manage expectations, it isn't visually pleasing…

    2025 · brainpaingames.com · its alternatives →

17. 17GD
    Game demo made with my homemade game engine▲101

    2025 · reprobate.site · its alternatives →

18. 18
    3D Game Programming using bitblting in Windows▲109

    3D using bitblting in Windows. Contribute to lowlevel86/3D-Game-Programming development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

19. 19AS
    A sample project for Golang▲57

    I have been using golang at work and personally for more than 2 years now. A problem i faced when I started and the problem new gophers even today is how to structure the project. Most (if not all) golang tutorials seem to be very simple and do not describe how to structure a large application. Following project is an attempt to Showcase a manageable project layout for services in golang. https://github.com/spy16/droplets This project is far from complete. Would like to hear some feedback from the community before continuing on this.

    2018 · its alternatives →

20. 20
    I built 80 mini-games using Fable before it was shut down▲54

    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 · its alternatives →

21. 21
    Basic voxel engine in WebGL/JavaScript with full source▲47

    Simple POC of PCG voxel-engine. Contribute to Lallassu/vox2 development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

22. 22
    Golangbot – Tutorials for beginners to get started with Go programming▲17

    Go tutorial to help beginners get started with Go programming quickly. These tutorials cover the basic hello world program as well as advanced concepts such as concurrency and reflection.

    2017 · golangbot.com · its alternatives →

23. 23AP
    A point-and-click game engine▲72

    2019 · purdone.com · its alternatives →

24. 24
    A Visual No-Code Game Engine – 50x Easier Than Unity▲10

    I've spent 30 years making games as both a hobby and profession, working with Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, RPG Maker, Ren'Py, Godot, and many others. A few years ago, I attended a game dev meetup and met dozens of people with incredible passion for making games – but they were struggling because they lacked technical knowledge. That's when I decided to build a tool that anyone could use to create games. I started developing this as a side project, eventually raised ~$100K through crowdfunding in Korea, then secured ~$200K in angel investment. I assembled a team, and we've been building this…

    Oct 2025 · play-maker.io · its alternatives →

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