Alternatives
Products that do what I created a selfhostable steam-like platform for loose game files does
- 1SO
2022 · github.com
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2019 · selfhostedsource.tech
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Hey HN! Rivet is an OSS game server management tool that enables game developers to easily deploy their dedicated servers without any infra experience. We recently open-sourced Rivet after working on it for the past couple of years. I wanted to share some of my favorite things about our experience building this with the HN community. My cofounder and I have been building multiplayer games together since middle school for fun (and not much profit [1]). In HS, I stumbled into building the entire infrastructure powering [Krunker.io](http://Krunker.io) (acq by FRVR) & other popular…
2023 · github.com
- 7HA
I'm making a platform for simple open source games you can play anywhere. Games are all just JavaScript classes and you can read the source of every game on the platform. I started working on initial "games" (mostly rendering tests) in 2018 and eventually built all of the platform stuff around it to make it easy to share games. There's also an in-browser editor available for you to make and publish games all from the browser. Would love some feedback on the games and studio features as well as the platform overall. All of the code is available at https://github.com/homegamesio
Jul 2026 · homegames.io
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Hi HN, I've been waiting to post what I've been working on for a few weeks now:) Today we're launching LayerVault, which is a version control system made for designers. The URL is http://www.layervault.com LayerVault keeps track of what you're working on without adding extra steps to your process. The app runs in your toolbar and tracks changes you make to your files. Basically — each time you create or modify a file you’re working on, LayerVault saves a copy. You can then login, flip through its versions, and download a version from a few weeks ago. It's pretty neat — and we’ve built some…
2011
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Last week I launched LANCommander v1.0.0 after about two years of development. LANCommander is an open source digital game distribution platform. In essence, it's a ways to self-host your own game library ala Steam, GOG, Epic, etc. It originally started as a project to automate the distribution of games at a LAN party I co-host. We have about 24 peak players each session and there came a point where trying to get games to work ate more time than we actually spent playing games. The natural conclustion was to write my own launcher and server to distribute files across the network. v1.0.0…
2024 · github.com
- 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
- 18VA
Hi HN, I'm Adriano, one of the makers of Vaultrice. I'm excited (and a little nervous!) to share what we've been building. For years, we found ourselves in a frustrating loop: whenever we needed a simple real-time feature—like a "who's online" list, a collaborative app, or just sharing state between a marketing site and our main app — we'd end up spending days setting up the same stack or discarded to do it. Setting it up, it always involved wiring together a database, a WebSocket server, an API, and managing the connection state. It felt like massive overkill for what we were trying to…
2025 · vaultrice.com
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- 20OM
I’m tired of getting screwed by game backends like Microsoft PlayFab and Unity Gaming Services. To get a simple cross-platform friends system, we’ve bent over backward fighting against their limited APIs to jerry-rig the behavior we need. These backends “solved” their platform’s rigidity by tacking on a clunky scripting layer [1] [3] with a proprietary KV database [2] [4] (look ma, no transactions!). They proceed to claim you can build a LiveOps game on this rubbish without testing, database migrations, monitoring, BI tooling, etc. We got fed up and built an open-source backend engine as an…
2024
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Private offline vault for passwords, files & notes
Jul 2026 · 7sisterstech.com
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It's free and open source. The aim is to have more transparent access to wine prefixes and the surrounding tooling (winetricks, proton configuration, etc...) per game in comparison to Lutris. Same features like statistics (time played, times launched, times crashed, and so on) per game is available in the app.
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 23WC
2022 · hypervault.com
- 24LA
After 14 months and probably over 1,000 hours, I'm finally at the point where I feel like I can show off my side project, LANCommander. As the title states, LANCommander is a self-hosted, open source digital distribution platform for PC games. The project started to solve the woes of a regular in-person LAN party that I participate in with some friends. I got tired of spending more time solving technical issues than playing games, so I decided to create a tool to help automate the process. The server application is built as a .NET 8 Blazor application. Database access is implemented with…
2024 · github.com
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