Alternatives
Products that do what Deadly Dispatch – A physics puzzle game 13 years in the making does
Thirteen years ago, I had an idea: build a bomb from different stages and materials, call in an airdrop over a zombie-infested city, and let physics do the rest. Set off chain reactions through fuel stations and car wrecks. The catch? There are survivors down there too, so every strike is a balancing act. I’ve always loved messing around with physics demos, and in my head, the core loop was already fun. So I built a few prototypes, but none of them stuck. I never clicked with Unity, and every attempt eventually died. Every couple of years, I’d check the App Store, Steam, or just search…
- 1AC
Hello HN! After I got a great response on my first game, I wanted to share the second game I ever made. It's an infinite jumping game, but there are bombs to watch out for! It can be played both on desktop and mobile. It can be installed as a PWA too. If you enjoyed, please leave a star on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/shajidhasan/dotventure Thanks for taking a look. Years ago, whenever I wanted to build games, I'd always stop because I felt I needed to create original game assets but could never get it done. After making this game, I've realized that you…
2024 · dotventure.vercel.app
- 2IL
I am a 50-year-old who left a FAANG Engineering Manager job to build a sci-fi game. I just released Outsider, a sci-fi narrative game with multiple endings. If you want to support my work, the game is now 15% off (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/). I've always wanted to create a game. I moved from Brazil to the US to work at Big Tech, but after a career of customer focus, mission alignment and 360-degree feedback, I wanted to experience solo game development. While FAANG can be soul-crushing at times, I had a great manager and an amazing team. The pay and…
Nov 2025
- 3IM
https://coffeegameonline.com/game/arch-rush-3d this game is heavily inspired from the viral hyper casual mobile Game. in which play runs in a certain direction until the screen is tap and direction changes, I love this Game very much for lot of hours, of never-ending levels and increasing difficulty The arc-rush is also based on the same functionality. Were you have to jump through floating platforms by jumping over them and each platform is placed zigzag towards the forward direction of the player. You have to wait until an arc is moving towards the right platform. One…
Apr 2026
- 4AS
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
- 5SE
Hey, I've shared this game while it was still a work in progress in one of the Tell HN threads. I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of people tried it, and I got some positive feedback and constructive criticism. Anyway, I found a gamedev library I really like - Kaplay [1]. What I like about it is that easy things are easy. Meaning I could have fun building the game without learning (or fighting) a new tool. I always wanted to make games, but this is the first one I actually did. And I have to tell you - game development sparks joy! It combines so many things (game design, programming,…
Jan 2026 · muffinman-io.itch.io
- 6DV
I'm using AI (mostly Claude) to create/publish a new video game every day This is day 33, first stab at the tower defense genre. Most of the games (including this one) I build with a single prompt. Rarely, a couple extra prompts are needed for bug fixes or to tweak the physics/UI. Extremely rarely, the AI has difficulty making the game work right (usually drawing it) and it takes a dozen or more prompts -- but the majority of the time, it gets everything right and makes a fully playable game first try Happy to answer any questions, just a little hobby project of mine I'm having…
May 2026 · gamevibe.us
- 7
This was a lot of fun to build! I have an autistic son who is extremely interested in power lines, electrical transmission towers, and how the grid works. I decided to build a little game for him. When I finally showed it to him with bated breath, he rolled his eyes and said, “Is it 3D? I’ll only like it if it’s 3D!” So, I decided to polish it up and release it to the world! You get a 9x9 map with one power plant, three houses, and terrain obstacles, and the goal is to connect the power plant to the houses with an optimal path. Beneath the coat of paint, it’s a graph theory optimization…
12d ago · wirespan.app
- 8FA
Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com
- 9AA
I built this over the holiday break with my two girls (ages 6 and 8). You pilot a UFO and beam up humans, cows, cats, dogs, and sheep for points. They drew all the art while I talked to Claude Code to scaffold the game logic. The magic moment was watching my kids use voice dictation to talk directly to Claude Code. My 8-year-old asked for a "purpler" tractor beam and watched it change in real time. She wasn’t coding, but she _was_ driving: describing what she wanted, testing the result, and iterating fast. It was really cool to watch... later on she asked me what javascript was and we dug…
Jan 2026 · studio.mfelix.org
- 10WM
Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…
2014
- 11SA
Me and my boyfriend are making a puzzle game together. The goal of the game is to follow a specific pattern by moving around in a grid. Since we are both web developers, we chose to do it in React and Typescript rather than a game engine. We will release it on Steam in November, using Electron to package the app as a desktop executable. Not sure if it has saved us time to do it in React, but we didn't feel like learning a new tool and it has worked really well! I thought making a game would take a lot of time, but we started in December so we will finish this project in less than a year. And…
2024 · lageb.itch.io
- 12IB
In each level, the goal is to climb to the top of the wall. Each wall has a unique layout of handholds, magnets, hooks, and elevators, and only one path to the top. The challenge is finding the right combination of moves to get you there. After each unsuccessful attempt, you can view the entire wall from afar to plan your route and strategize before trying again. I just released this on App Lab and would love to get some feedback and see how much interest there is in the concept. It’s listed at $3, but if anyone here wants a free key, just email me at [email protected]. I also set up…
2024 · meta.com
- 13MW
Happy Halloween! Instead of going to a Halloween party this year, my wife and I decided to run a tiny Hackathon and built this little retro choose-your-own-adventure to pay tribute to a popular series of yesteryear. Try and escape! Also pumpkin mode!! We made liberal use of ChatGPT for code, DALLE3/Midjourney for images, but did most of the storyboarding/writing ourselves because we couldn't stand the style of GPT4/Claude.
2023 · tremella.github.io
- 14IM
Hello HackerNews, I'm Kaamkiya, the author of this program. It's a collection of minimal games made for terminals, like 2048, Hangman, and even two player games like pong. They're all text-based, but they can actually be quite fun. If you want to test it right now, you can do this: go run github.com/Kaamkiya/gg@latest I started this project out of boredom, honestly. I was bored, and when I'm bored I like to code or play video games. So I coded video games. I kept them really minimal though, because I'm not great at gamedev and thought it would be easier to contribute to text-based…
2024 · github.com
- 15IB
I built a website for games that catch my eye or have something interesting going on. I made it for fun but then updating became a habit. Maybe you'll find your next "must-play" game here? GitHub repo: https://github.com/RaycatWhoDat/games-list
Nov 2025 · alistof.games
- 16IB
I'm working on the Survival Crafting RPG that you would have played on your Apple II back in the '80s. You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based UI of the old Ultima games. It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot. I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. It's complete up through the Bronze Age (in Valheim terms). Let me know what you think!…
May 2026
- 17
A falling block puzzle with a twist, literally! With so much nostalgia your head will spin.
7h ago · blocknado.app
- 18EA
I recently went on a long walk (to get newborn twins to nap) and ended up having a long discussion with ChatGPT in voice mode; asking it to explain how the Enigma machine worked and clarifying all the errors in my current understanding. I ended up going right back to basics and then subsequently spent ages failing to understand how it was cracked. Anyway, I built this in an attempt to recreate that arc for people (like me) who find Enigma intimidating: 13 stages, ~15 minutes, ending in a sandbox machine and the "no letter encrypts to itself" flaw that doomed it. Built with React + SVG +…
May 2026 · enigma.rory.codes
- 19AW
I’ve spent the last few days prototyping a browser-based game engine stack designed for instant-load, "Roblox-for-Teens" style deployment. The goal is to lower the floor for AA indie devs who want high-fidelity physics and instant web distribution without the overhead of Unity or a heavy Godot export. The Stack Engine: A headless WASM/WebGPU implementation. I’m currently using custom flags and selective streaming to bypass standard browser memory and execution limits. Physics: I’ve ported Jolt (Guerrilla Games) but modified the solver to mimic the original Blam! engine (Bungie/Halo…
Jan 2026
- 201M
Howdy, long time HN'er. Spent ~20 years in FAANG and startups, got the pink slip during a big layoff wave in spring 2023. That's ok, I was about to quit anyway :) Finally got back to a lifelong goal of mine, making an "indie" game. (Indie is subjective, but you get the drift.) So, here it is: Ballionaire, a "fast-paced pachinko roguelike where strategy meets physics to create outrageous wealth!" My influences were: Plinko(TM), Luck Be A Landlord, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. I was really fortunate because localthunk, the dev behind Balatro, noticed my game during its first month of…
2024 · store.steampowered.com
- 21OC
Hi Hacker News! My Co Co-op Matt and I are on a work term and were given the task of building a webapp that could make $20 in four weeks as our onboarding challenge. We're in the final stretch here and would sure appreciate HN's thoughts (we realize we kind of did this backwards, building something first before talking to people who might use it, but hey! We're leaning.). So basically, we tried to apply game dynamics to retaining visitors to websites by offering a reward (ie. discount coupon / premium content, etc.) for meeting various 'objectives' (ie. pages to visit). We call it ScavSite…
2011
- 22AP
I made a lightweight web game about compute CAPEX tradeoffs: https://darios-dilemma.up.railway.app/ No signup, runs on mobile/desktop. Loop per round: 1. choose compute capacity 2. forecast demand 3. allocate capacity between training and inference 4. random demand shock resolves outcome You can end profitable, cash constrained, or bankrupt depending on allocation + forecast error. Goal was to make the decision surface intuitive in 2–3 minutes per run. It’s a toy model and deliberately omits many real world factors. Note: this is based on what I learned after listening to…
Feb 2026 · darios-dilemma.up.railway.app
- 23MD
Hello HN: I love the randomness of the universe. I've been spending some time creating a Craps simulator to help experience this love without having to shell out like a real degenerate. For others similarly fascinated: I would love to hear any and all feedback you've got on this. It's meant to be unique in the sense that it's a community-oriented, infinite simulation.
Feb 2026 · infinitecraps.com
- 24AA
I recently prototyped a web game for a nonprofit to highlight the dangers of phone addiction, but unfortunately I ended up making a really addictive game instead. :-\ I'm sharing this here mainly to serve as an indicator of what can be achieved early-2026 by a senior dev working with Opus 4.7 over 2 days using genuinely collaborative prompting. (ie plan->feedback->iterate) Hope it provides some inspiration or entertainment - there's a level editor too - maybe Hacker Newsers could share their favourite creations here? PS: If there's enough demand I'm happy to Open Source this (or DM me) -…
May 2026 · downtime.partridge.works
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →