Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Half-Life 2 running on your browser
Hello Hacker News! I’ve been working on a side project that ports the entire Source Engine to run in the browser using Emscripten. (Yes, the same engine that powered Half-Life 2, Portal, CSGO, and more.) It’s still a work-in-progress some features are missing and the launcher is in development but core engine functionality is up and running. I’d love feedback, ideas, or contributions. If you’re curious, feel free to check it out, star it, or open a pull request! Here's the link to the source code - https://github.com/OrbitaStudios/LambdaComplexSource
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1TS
Hello everyone, I would like to see if there is any interest in this little project that I have been working on for the past few years. Could be relevant, seeing the direction in which the mainstream game engines are going. I didn't really like any of the already existing options, so I tried to make my own and it turned out to be easier than expected. It's sort of like a low-budget Unreal/Source, but with open-world streaming support and it is free and open source. Very old-school. But optimized for more modern hardware. Very fast too. Still not production ready, but it seems like it is…
2025 · racenis.github.io · its alternatives →
- 2
Modd.io is a collaborative game editor that runs in browser. It's kind of like Figma for game dev. We made this engine low-code and multiplayer-first, so developeres can quickly prototype casual multiplayer games. I hope some of you guys will find this useful. Would love to hear feedback also. Thank you. Engine Demo: https://www.modd.io
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3UL
In the wake of all the Unity nonsense, just wanted to toss the Raverie engine into this mix :) We’re building off a previous engine that we worked on for DigiPen Institute of Technology called the Zero Engine with a similar component based design architecture to Unity. Our engine had a unique feature called Spaces: separate worlds/levels that you can instantiate and run at the same time, which became super useful for creating UI overlays using only game objects, running multiple simulations, etc. The lighting and rendering engine is scriptable, and the default deferred rendering…
2023 · raverie-us.github.io · its alternatives →
- 4
Earlier this year, we released our open-source game engine [0] built with Rust, WebAssembly, and WebGPU. Today, we’re happy to announce the Ambient platform, which brings web deployment, server hosting, and more to the runtime. With Ambient, you can make a game, deploy it to the browser in one command, share your URL and instantly play with others, no downloads or installs needed. Our WASM use is innovative; it is being used as both a sandboxed runtime for user code, and as a way to run the entire Ambient runtime in the browser. This, paired with our ECS data model, enables a highly modular…
2023 · ambient.run · its alternatives →
- 5MM
Fun free no-download game you
2021 · vnav.io · its alternatives →
- 6
Hi HN! Thanks for your attention to my post. It was a big challenge to run most of Node.js packages in browser, fast moreover. Virtual File system, resolve import/export. I got cold many times, depressions, burned out, yet still alive and finished it. Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of positive feedback. There are 200,000 monthly unique users. I work full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest - I am happy after many years of hard work.
2022 · playcode.io · its alternatives →
- 7IM
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 →
- 8MA
hi all, I've always wanted to make my own game, but couldn't afford a thousand-dollar adobe (flash+photoshop) license. I'm not a talented programmer, have no degree in CS. But I understand some elements of design. So I got me a copy of ImpactJS, and after about 5 months of steep learning curve (at least for me), I managed to come up with a game. I also integrated it with a highscore and badge system, similar to what you get at Kongregate. You need to login with Google/OpenID to earn badges/scores. link is: http://www.hotbazooka.com/privatejoe hope to hear some feedback/questions from you guys!
2011 · hotbazooka.com · its alternatives →
- 9
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 →
- 10
Explore Quake/GoldSrc maps in your browser. Contribute to sbuggay/bspview development by creating an account on GitHub.
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11MP
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 →
- 12
We’ve been building infrastructure to spin up browsers for AI agents. Originally, we built[0] it as a pool of warm Docker containers running Chromium, exposing: - Chrome DevTools Protocol (for Playwright/Puppeteer) - noVNC (for live view) We’ve been following the unikernel space for a while, so we decided to see if we could get our image on one. We went with Unikraft Cloud[1]. Here’s how it did: - Boot-up time: 10–20ms (vs. ~5s for Docker containers) - Near 0 CPU/memory consumption when idle - Still ~8GB RAM when active (headful Chromium) Potential use cases: - Standby mode during…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
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 →
- 14
"Game" is a stretch, but I put together this repo containing a pure Rust app which uses SDL2 and compiles to WASM (and can be run in a browser). Older resources were a bit out of date and a bit too verbose for my purposes, so here's a minimal working example.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
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 →
- 16AW
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 · its alternatives →
- 17SF
Hi HN! I’ve been building a 2D game using a custom engine I wrote from scratch – no Unity, no frameworks. It’s fully self-funded and will be released commercially on Steam. Engine source code (MIT): http://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo I’d love feedback on the gameplay, visuals, performance, or anything else. Thanks!
2025 · bereprobate.com · its alternatives →
- 18IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026 · its alternatives →
- 19
I’m nervous, announcing this, as it isn’t ready to ship out to the general public yet, and I haven’t had any feedback at all from anyone, I’m out on my own here. I think this concept itself is kind of dismissed outright a lot too, and I understand why, I wouldn’t believe me either actually. But, I do believe this is very much worth your time to check out, I am not aware of anything else very much like it. I won’t repeat what is already written on the github README here, but some info: I am a successful semi-retired solo game developer, I have been making my own bespoke game engines since…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20MF
I know everyone is a bit burned out on blockchain and cryptocurrency related stuff around these parts, but I've been working on as a side project for the last few months and thought you guys might be interested: https://cryptoempire.io/ It's still a bit buggy and incomplete (the mobile ux needs a lot of work, the leaderboard isn't functional yet, etc.), but I've reached a point where I'm not totally ashamed of sharing it :) Any feedback would be most welcome!
2018 · its alternatives →
- 21
My wife and I recently submitted to a mobile game jam on Newgrounds (yes, it's still around). What started as a question of whether we could do it somehow morphed into whether we could do without so many of the seemingly needless complications rampant in our respective industries. My wife thus did all the art as traditional frame-by-frame animation (no puppets or tweening) and I preceded without a game engine. I did use a pre-processor that gives JS a Lisp syntax (Parenscript), because C-syntax is gross. We hope the end result, while definitely of small scope, will serve to inspire some…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hi HN! Lifelong avid gamer here, hugely passionate about WASM and WebGPU. I firmly believe that these technologies will enable console and PC quality titles to be accessible through a browser, and with this, we'll need a new discoverability layer. Looking online, platforms like CrazyGames and Poki cater to a casual/hypercasual demographic, and I couldn't find anything out there that was for me, a core gamer that typically uses Steam and consoles. So I vibe coded my own! It features WASM ports of classic games, as well as some indie Unity titles. The goal is to host mainly WebGPU titles…
May 2026 · gameghost.manus.space · its alternatives →
- 23
This was an interesting porting project for a few reasons (IMO): - The original game is/was awesome and, from a programming perspective, a wonder -- smooth scrolling arcade game on a 128kb Mac in 1984... - The port was done with a lot of help from AI (mostly Claude Code, but some Gemini CLI as well). I'm a programmer; it wasn't vibe-coded. But I couldn't have done the port of 68k assembly without it. FWIW, Claude seemed better at actually porting the 68k assembly but Gemini was better at finding bugs. YMMV. - I love Redux and Redux Toolkit for state management. For the port, I put the…
2025 · continuumjs.com · its alternatives →
- 24AM
Hi everyone! I'm one of the developers behind this project. I wrote it with my two brothers, Daniel and Ricardo. For years the three of us have been curious about how multiplayer games work, which is why we decided to work on this project. Our goal was to gain a deep understanding of how different players can share the same 3D space, which is why we wrote our own tiny game engine instead of using something like Unity. We wrote the engine using C++ and OpenGL, and we then compiled it to WebAssembly using Emscripten so that it would run effortlessly on web browsers. We are really excited about…
2022 · play.moonlightmuseum.io · its alternatives →
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