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Products that do what I built a refinery simulator game to explain job to my kids does
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…
- 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
- 2IT
2019 · s-poony.github.io
- 3AM
Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…
2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com
- 4
- 5IM
Hey, maker here. After launching a daily word search game, I randomly thought of this math game while driving. Finally got around to making it and I think it turned out pretty cool. It’s a math search game that’s meant to help you practice your quick addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills. I’m hoping it’ll help people (even those like me who aren’t big on math) learn and increase their speeds. (There are also some settings you can enable to make the game harder) If you try it out, please let me know if you found it fun, if you have anything you’d like me to add, or if you…
2024 · worchle.com
- 6MP
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
- 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
- 8
- 9IM
Inspired by games like Turing Complete/Virtual Circuit Board/Logic World, I tried to make a mix of aseprite and wiredworld/wired-logic, the idea being the user can build a digital circuit using a "fullstack" pixelart creation workflow. The circuit is just an image. The primitives are (i) connected wires which have undefined, 0 or 1 state during simulation (displayed brighter or darker in function of the state) and (ii) NANDs, which are little pixel triangles. During simulation the user can interact with any wire by clicking on it, toggling its state, which is cool for messing…
2024 · github.com
- 10IB
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
- 11MS
This is a little game implemented over a week of tinkering and targeting Emacs. The point is both to have fun with this kind of simulations, and also explore the "functional core / imperative shell" approach to architecture. I also developed a tile and tile effect definition DSL, which makes this even easier to extend. From this point of view it's a success: easy testing, easy extension, Gameplay-wise the simulation is too simplistic, and needs input from people interested in this kind of toys. The original Micropolis/SimSity is the last time I built a virtual city.
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 12IG
I built this educational game to help people identify and understand dark patterns in digital products. It features 10 interactive scenarios based on real-world examples. The game includes: • Interactive pattern recognition scenarios • Explanations of psychological principles • Simulated real-world examples with guided feedback Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind. I'd especially appreciate feedback on the educational approach and scenario design.
2025 · games.productartistry.com
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- 14
- 15IM
I built ChipBuilder to make computer architecture more approachable through interactive puzzles. You start with basic logic gates like AND, OR, and NOT, then gradually combine them into adders, multiplexers, memory, an ALU, and eventually a complete CPU. Once you've built the hardware, you can write assembly programs that run on the processor you created. The game is inspired by courses like Nand2Tetris, but everything runs directly in the browser with a visual circuit editor, simulations, and progressively harder challenges.
Jul 2026 · select.supply
- 162C
A pretty simple but fun to play with simulator for a concept from mathematical physics called the "2D Coulomb gas". I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of WebGPU acceleration (ported with liberal help from Codex to get through all of the boilerplate). Play around with it - hopefully read up more on the 2D Coulomb gas because it is an incredibly deep topic research wise.
Feb 2026 · simonhalvdansson.github.io
- 17GD
2025 · reprobate.site
- 18AS
Hi HN, I’m a former C++ dev turned Product Manager. I’ve noticed many engineers struggle with the "politics" side of things when they become Leads. To help with this, I’m building a text-based simulator. It is NOT an AI chatbot. It is a hand-crafted, branching narrative (logic tree) based on real experiences. I just launched the first scenario: "The Backchannel VP." The Setup: Your VP Engineering is bypassing you and giving tasks directly to your juniors, causing chaos. Your Goal: Stop the backchanneling without getting fired. It’s a short, specific puzzle. I’d love to know if you think the…
Jan 2026 · apmcommunication.com
- 19AM
"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
- 20EA
Hi HN, I made this small game in my spare time. It's quite addictive, I spent a lot of hours playing instead of polishing it. My own highscore is 96,792. Source code is at https://github.com/MikeBellika/tile-game. It's made with react, tailwind, and framer motion. Hope you enjoy!
2024 · bellika.dk
- 21BD
2021 · github.com
- 22AI
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 23IB
I am a solo developer, and I built Core MBA because I was frustrated with the "video course" default in business education. I wanted to build a "compiler for business logic"—a tool where I could read a concept in 5 minutes and immediately test it in a hostile environment to see if my strategy actually compiles or throws a runtime error. The project is a business simulator built on React 19 and TypeScript. The core technical innovation isn't just using AI; it's the architecture of a closed loop between a deterministic economic engine and a generative AI validation layer. The biggest technical…
Jan 2026 · core-mba.pro
- 24SM
I've always loved RTS games and wanted to make a game similar for a long time. I thought I'd just try and build a mini / puzzle game around the resource gathering aspects of an RTS. Objective: You have a base at the center and you need to mine and "refine" all of the resources on the map in as short a time as possible. By default, the game will play automatically, but not optimally (moving and buying upgrades). You can disable that with the buttons. You can select drones and right click to move them to specific resources patches and buy upgrades as you earn upgrade points. I've…
Jan 2026 · speedminers.fun
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