AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Development Journey on Game Decompilation Using AI
Hey, ever wanted to fully understand or tweak a nostalgic game that you love? So, I’m documenting my journey on matching decompiling a retro game, step by step, using AI and self-made tools. Three chapters are done, and the fourth is in progress. Matching decompilation is a fun reverse engineering challenge that paves the way to learn more about a game and fully customize it. Let me know your thoughts about my posts and the VS Code extension that I'm developing, called Kappa! Have you ever heard of matching decompilation, by the way?
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2AF
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 →
- 3
Over the past few months I've been heavily involved in the decompilation community. I've been hands-on decompiling a beloved game from my childhood (Star Fox Adventures). I started this journey with zero prior decomp experience—and to make things worse I had never really touched C nor assembly either. Learning how to decompile was challenging. It's difficult to find any good learning resources for it and any open-source projects for this are inactive and/or contain little actual learning material. So I put together Decomp Academy! Decomp Academy is an interactive way to learn how to…
Jun 2026 · decomp-academy.dev · its alternatives →
- 4
A decompilation of LEGO Island (1997). Contribute to isledecomp/isle development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5IM
In the expanding world of AI my heart still lies in AST transforms, browser fingerprinting, and anti-bot circumvention. But my workflow felt... primitive.
2025 · nullpt.rs · its alternatives →
- 6IW
I’ve been working on a puzzle game for a few years as a side project. The game is based on a small region of tiles in a grid that is mirrored, modified, and mirrored again. It’s based on a novel phenomenon I noticed where, once these mutations happen a few times, the original region can be hard to recognize. You have a feeling there are symmetries in the image, but they are just out of grasp. Going further, if only part of the region is visible, such as mirroring off the edge of the board, it adds to the feeling and it becomes a satisfying puzzle to solve. I originally published this on the…
2024 · hidden-mirrors.com · its alternatives →
- 7
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 →
- 8
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 →
- 9
Trails▲81Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…
Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 10AM
Hey HN, Michael and Scott here. We’re open-sourcing an interactive murder mystery featuring LLM-driven character agents. Solve the mystery by finding clues, taking notes, and interrogating agents. They all have distinct motives, personality, and can impact the game in different ways (attacking you, running away, etc). Try it out, it’s pretty fun! We’re also open-sourcing the framework that we used to make and refine the agents. The goal is to create an intuitive interface for storytellers to create, debug, and test game agents. We then take those game agents and expose an API beyond just…
2023 · gron.games · its alternatives →
- 11
👾 The code for my Three.js game dev experiments on YouTube. - SuboptimalEng/three-js-games
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
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 →
- 13
Apr 2026 · spectrelang.org · its alternatives →
- 14
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 →
- 15
I made a strategy game where you play the US or China through the AI race, 2026 to 2030, sixteen quarterly turns in the browser. One run takes about half an hour. At the start, the game seals two dice you never get to see. Inside: how hard alignment really is, and how fast takeoff compounds. You get eval reports, but only as ranges, and they flatter you most exactly when your systems are least aligned. At the end you get a debrief which shows what your evals said each quarter and also what was actually true. I lost every run I played myself so far. Every number in the game is source-backed…
Jul 2026 · criticalwindow.org · its alternatives →
- 16MC
Hey all, just wanted to share a little game experiment. It's a rooms & keys kind of adventure with a lot of random deaths. It plays a Veo3-generated video in response to clicks, with Gemini used for coding. Prompting the videos was fun, but trying to vibe code everything was not. In the future I'll go back to using LLMs more sparingly for isolated functions, or at least try not to have it create anything that requires seeing the output to debug.
2025 · bemmu.com · its alternatives →
- 17IM
Hi HN! Solo developer here. 10 days ago, I started building this after spending countless hours copying/pasting marketing sections and fighting to keep them consistent with our design system. I wondered: "What if AI could understand our design system and generate React components that actually match it?" Current progress (10 days in): - Can generate hero sections that follow your design tokens - Uses your actual component variants and styles - Works with Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui It's very early days, but I'm excited to share it with other devs who: - Are tired of rebuilding…
2024 · robustlaunch.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hi guys, I’m excited to share an update on ReproModel, an open-source toolbox designed to streamline the testing and reproduction of machine learning models. I, like many of you, have really struggled with benchmarking and comparing models, from missing code, to opaque experiment parameters slowing the process. I decided to take matters into my own hands, and created a mini-toolbox in my free time to streamline the process. The goal is to reduce the time and effort spent on replicating experiments, enabling researchers to focus on innovation rather than setup. Knowing this task is not an…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
I'm an "ideas person" who messes around with AI on a low budget. I got tired of watching my tokens vanish and context windows filling up while agents fumbled around trying to find the right thing. Agents don't flail like they used to with shell tools, but there are still weak/blind spots and back-and-forth episodes — especially when using tools in combination/sequence. So I built "tilth" today. Or rather, AI built it — every line is Opus 4.6. I spent a lot of my precious tokens getting it to "not shit" (at least several of the different vendors' AI overlords assure me it's not…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20IB
You speak to the Oracle of Aion, an ancient entity with the power to affect the dungeon. If your wish is worthy, he may grant it, and the dungeon remember your wish forevermore. The changes will be visible for all players, forever. Play now in the browser! Free and no registration. Disclaimers: I singlehandedly made this game, it is in a crude state, the oracle works 50% of the time. Also, since your wishes turn into code automatically via AI, and literally anyone can wish whatever he wants, dont expect a polished experience. However, nothing like it exists and its free, enjoy the chaos!…
May 2026 · aion.quest · its alternatives →
- 21
Reverse engineering with AI + multi-decompiler support
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
I started off with a simple goal: port the game Soldat to Typescript. I ended up not only with the game, but with a full system to train AI bots to play my own game, building a neural net to train new bot AIs from tens of thousands of simulated matches with different strategies. It also runs live all the time on my website and has a news dashboard and you can replay any game exactly. It all was a very fun way to dig into Fable's capabilities. The bill if I had done this with API billing? Nearly $2000.
Jun 2026 · soldat.bobbby.online · its alternatives →
- 23MN
This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time, and I decided to finally code it up. In the same way that Scrabble decomposes words into letters, what if there was a game that decomposed letters into sub-shapes? There’s a lot of directions this could go, and I’m still exploring the possibility space. Enjoy. Suggestions welcome. It doesn’t have a real name yet.
2024 · shovemedia.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi there, I've created this side project to make it easier to find interesting repositories using AI. There's still a lot of work to be done to improve it, so any suggestions for enhancements would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
2024 · awesome-repositories.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 →