Commerce · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Deadly Dispatch – A physics puzzle game 13 years in the making
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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 2
Hi HN, I’m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game. Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU. I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay. I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied…
Mar 2026 · fuelingcuriosity.com · its alternatives →
- 3MP
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 →
- 4
Building a 1D-Pong game is a bit of a rite of passage at the Chaos Communication Congress. I was inspired by a version I saw at 38C3 and built my own interpretation for 39C3. Lots of people enjoyed playing it and even Elliot Williams featured it in his 39C3 Hackaday Podcast. And I can attest: it's truly fun because it's sooo simple at first sight - but wait until the speed increases... Not a bad work to fun created ratio for such a little project. I used the opportunity to play around with Claude Code on my preexisting codebase to publish a nice-ish repo on GitHub. It worked great without…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
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 · its alternatives →
- 6
Hi, I'm Will. I'm 24, autistic, and have OCD tendencies. I'm learning to code and this is my first public project. I’d really appreciate your feedback and encouragement! This project lets me solve some of my OCD problems online. There are a couple of parts of the forums that I visit – Space Battles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing – that I want to remove. Specifically, I hate seeing indicators of how much is left in a forum thread, because I keep thinking about how much content is left. It stops me from immersing myself in the story. It stressed me out. Before I learned to…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
- 8IB
Hey HN! What started off as a meme has turned into a passion project and I'm pretty excited about it. As the title suggests, I made a Rock, Paper, Scissors game in React. The twist is the perk shop that you can power yourself up upon wins. I have a Node web socket backend because it started off as just a PvP experience, but I wanted people to be able to play a solo mode. That's where the Roguelike comes in. I still have plenty of features to go! But for now, it's an endless Roguelike where after each round, you get to upgrade a shop perk to make your character stronger. I'd love to get some…
2024 · xtremerps.com · its alternatives →
- 9IL
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 · its alternatives →
- 10
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 →
- 11IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 12
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 →
- 13
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 · its alternatives →
- 14
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 · its alternatives →
- 15
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…
Aug 2026 · wirespan.app · its alternatives →
- 16
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 · its alternatives →
- 17
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 · its alternatives →
- 18WM
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 · its alternatives →
- 19
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 · its alternatives →
- 20
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 · its alternatives →
- 21MW
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 · its alternatives →
- 22
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 · its alternatives →
- 23
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 · its alternatives →
- 24
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 · stravaeger.com · 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 →