Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Boulder Dash style game made in x86_64 assembly
It doesn’t use any libraries, not even the C standard lib! It just uses the Linux system call interface. Drawing to the screen is done by writing directly to /dev/fb0. I created this just to learn assembly - something of a lost art these days. I’m mainly a C++ developer. This has been a lot of fun and very enlightening. Here is a video: https://youtu.be/IoJQ80pWyGI
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Boulder Dash style game made in x86_64 assembly launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1MP
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 →
- 2
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 →
- 3
I made this game to teach my daughter how buffer overflows work. I want her to look at programs as things she can change, and make them do whatever she wants. Building your exploit in memory and jumping to it feels so cool. I hope this game teaches kids and programmers (who seem to have forgotten what computers actually are) that its quite fun to mess with programs. We used to have that excitement few years ago, just break into softice and change a branch into a nop and ignore the serial number check, or go to a different game level because this one is too annoying. While working on the game…
2023 · punkx.org · its alternatives →
- 4
To try it out, simply build the project yourself from source, or use attached bootable ISO image of the system (in Releases on Github) and run it in QEMU. https://blog.vxn.dev/rou2exos-rusted-edition
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
While helping one of my students create and iterate on a game in C using raylib, I realized there was quite a lot of time spent on experimenting with level design and colors, how the player moves, gravity, etc. and a lot of time was wasted making a change, exiting the game, recompiling, running the game, deciding his change wasn't right, and going through the whole cycle over and over. I could tell it was demotivating, and this process was creating a barrier that prevented him from experimenting to his heart's content. I started this project to solve this problem by giving a simple gui to a…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
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 →
- 7
C++ Path Tracer from scratch with zero third-party libraries. - themartiano/luz
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Crown Engine. Contribute to dbartolini/crown development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Learn how classic game hardware worked. Write code and see it run instantly.
2016 · 8bitworkshop.com · its alternatives →
- 10IM
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 →
- 11
It requires no registration, no installation, and no configuration. Just run it on any computer and start drawing freely.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
GitHub repo: https://github.com/ArcadeMakerSources/ArcadeMaker (first of all, i want to say that I made this project for fun and challenge. I always wanted to create my own language. This has no business goal or something.) So the project is a 2D game engine (MonoGame backend) inspired by GameMaker 8. It includes its own IDE (built with WinForms) and an interpreted programming language that I wrote myself. The language—definitely the biggest challenge in the project—is a simple dynamically typed language. When I started, I had zero knowledge of how to build something like…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Hey, I'm the co-founder of Magma and coded huge chunks of the product. My other co-founder Radek coded the collaborative drawing engine in Typescript with parts in Web Assembly and also using WebGL - that's why it has a native app feel. If you have an iPad or a Wacom tablet we support pressure sensitivity (enable Windows Ink if you have issues). We prepared 10 drawings that you can join. Beware that there is a 30 users (drawing at once) limit on each. You can easily create your own drawing and share the url with others to join. https://magm.ai/k36k…
2022 · magmastudio.io · its alternatives →
- 14
Hi HN! Korean high school senior here, about to start CS in college. I built a browser engine from scratch in C++ to understand how browsers work. First time using C++, 8 weeks of development, lots of debugging—but it works! Features: - HTML parsing with error correction - CSS cascade and inheritance - Block/inline layout engine - Async image loading + caching - Link navigation + history Hardest parts: - String parsing(html, css) - Rendering - Image Caching & Layout Reflowing What I learned (beyond code): - Systematic debugging is crucial - Ship with known bugs rather than chase…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
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 →
- 16
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 →
- 17AC
Hello HN. This is a project me and some friends built at university in 2017. It was originally built in a rush, but we've added a few improvements over the years. It's a fun game to host at a demoparty and project on a big screen - We did that at Instanssi many times. The implementation is still rough, and suffers from the fast pace of the modern web - The frontend is likely very outdated, and the backend is built with Vapor 2 and Swift 3.1, both no longer supported. You can host this yourself, but it might be a bit of a pain to set up. The WebSocket protocol is fairly trivial to work out…
2022 · pixel.vkoskiv.com · its alternatives →
- 18
This started life as a graphics tool for a specific problem: gen AI can make retro-styled sprites but can't follow exact hardware constraints of pixels and colors. While building this I liked the idea that I can fan-out to any retro videogame console or handheld's specifications. I then devised my own declarative language - Demotic - to express the game you want to build as concisely and naturally as possible without implementation detail. To work on different machines, you use relative units, like vw, vh, vmin, vmax. It has a web UI, CLI and NPM package. Still a work in progress.
Aug 2026 · geosona.com · its alternatives →
- 19
A cross platform 2D game engine written in C++ for beginners - sdslabs/Rubeus
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) created Manim, the Python library he uses to make the math animations in his videos. We reimplemented Manim with the same Python API, but the implementation underneath is Rust, connected to Python through PyO3. The Rust code uses wgpu, so rendering happens on the GPU. To run it in the browser, we compiled the Rust parts to WebAssembly so the PyO3 extension loads in Pyodide. In the browser, wgpu targets the WebGPU API, so animations render in real time on your GPU through the browser. The editor is Monaco (the editor that powers VS Code) with a live preview:…
Jul 2026 · studio.academa.ai · its alternatives →
- 21
It took me 20 months to develop it in my spare time. I used Unity game engine, I did not have any game dev experience before. It was more complex that I thought at the begining, I spent lots of time on promotion, marketing, founding company, learning about the legal aspects of different parts, for example music. Some parts were easier than I expected. Unity makes it very easy to build for all three operating systems (Win, MacOs, Linux), I am not sure why more game devs are not using this possibility. I also like working on Steam as distribution system. It is not exactly easy for a newcomer,…
2022 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →
- 22IB
This weekend I created stacklib.h - a single-header library that brings Forth-style stack operations to C. It implements a basic interpreter with: - Stack operations (push/pop/dup/swap/over/drop) - Arithmetic (+, -, *, /) - Output (., emit, cr) - Stack inspection (.s, depth) Example usage: Stack s; stack_init(&s); dict_init(); exec(&s, "10 20 + ."); // Prints "30" exec(&s, "1 2 3 4 .s"); // Shows stack contents The library is self-contained, requires no dependencies, and handles basic error checking. It was inspired by wanting to understand…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 23RT
Hello everyone! I've created a programming language named Atlas in C, and I'm excited to share it with you. After many years of thinking about how to bridge CPU and GPU programming more effectively, I decided to build a minimalist language that focuses on a single structure: a stack of (up to 4-dimensional) tensors. Atlas is designed to be simple and efficient—it generalizes many of the concepts behind WebGL while offering some unique features. For example, it runs on Windows 10/11 and in browsers via emscripten, and it even has the capability to render directly to the Windows desktop.…
Nov 2025 · banditcat.github.io · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi HN, I'm Oliver. I've been in the software and cloud engineering industry for a long time (28 years), and this past year genuinely changed how I think about coding. The bottleneck isn’t syntax anymore. It’s clarity. I now spend more time describing what I want, testing results, and refining instructions than writing code line by line. The spark for this project came from a presentation I gave at my son’s school in December, 2025. I expected mild interest. Instead, kids were completely engaged — hands up, pitching game ideas, iterating in real time. That made me question something I’d…
Jan 2026 · pixelarcade.studio · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →