Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I created a tool to design and create foamcore inserts for boardgames
As a holiday project to test out spec first development using Codex CLI, I ended up creating https://boxinsertdesigner.com/ It lets you design a box insert in 2D and spits out a cutting list. I'm looking for feedback, bugs, feature ideas etc and figured this would be a good place to find it :)
Box Insert Designer is a tool for creating custom foamcore inserts for board games. Users design inserts in 2D within the application, which then generates a cutting list for fabrication. The tool was developed using… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hey folks, I’ve been working on using control-net to take in a video game level (input as a depth image) and output a beautiful illustration of that level. Play with it here: dimensionhopper.com or read the blog post about what it took to get it to work. Been a super fun project.
2023 · generalrobots.substack.com · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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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 →
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This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang. It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.
2024 · lostpixels.io · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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A liminal brush-based CSG editor and game engine with unified (forward) renderer inspired by Radiant and Worldcraft/Hammer Compact and lightweight (target: Snapdragon 8CX, OpenGL 3.3) Real-time lighting with stencil shadows without the need for pre-baked compilation
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool. It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me. The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in anything specific, let me know. Cheers!
2025 · muffinman.io · its alternatives →
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I’ve been using AI to generate some repetitive frontend (guilty), and while most outputs felt vibe-coded, some results were surprisingly good. So I cleaned it up and made a ranking game out of it with friends, and you can check it out here: https://www.designarena.ai/vote /vote: Your prompt will be answered by four random, anonymous models. You pick the one you prefer and crown the winner, tournament-style. /leaderboard: See the current winning models, as dictated by voter preferences. /play: Iterate quickly by seeing four models respond to the same input and…
2025 · designarena.ai · its alternatives →
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Last week I proposed to my girlfriend with a board game I created with stable diffusion, lexica.art and DALLE. I wrote about the process, hope you'll find in interesting.
2022 · bogomolnyelad.substack.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, After watching a lot of Show HN's here, it's finally my turn to show something. This is the first real project I have shipped, so it is extra special to me. For those who will inevitably ask why I made yet another mockup editor I covered it on our blog (http://blog.mocktailsapp.in/why-build-yet-another-mockup-editor-tm). Not all the features mentioned in that post have been implemented yet. As such Mocktails is pre-beta software and very minimal. It does not even have user accounts or any actual server side component at all for that matter (yet)! Our intention is to build Mocktails…
2012 · blog.mocktailsapp.in · its alternatives →
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Generate DLL injection templates for modding il2cpp games - juanmjacobs/il2cpp-modder
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Illustria▲46Hi HN I built Illustria – a simple tool to generate custom illustrations on demand Why I built it: - I was frustrated spending hours browsing stock sites for the right visuals. - Free illustrations often didn’t match the style I needed. - I wanted a faster way to get usable illustrations for landing pages, pitch decks, and side projects. What it does today: - Generate illustrations instantly based on your input (first generation is free). - Explore different looks/styles without needing design skills. - Download and use them right away. - Browse a free gallery of ready-made…
2025 · arcanvia.com · its alternatives →
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2024 · nest2d.online · its alternatives →
- 17AW
So, me (dev) and my friend (designer) have been building a website/mobile app to help users manage their game library (think MyAnimeList, but games) for a little over a year. We launched with a very basic set of features, and have been slowing expanding since then. All the code is open source, and most of the things we implemented were direct feedback from users (e.g. being able to import games from Steam/PSN, and the Posts feature). We don't show ads or have any kind of subscription. This is just a hobby project. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, as honestly the hardest…
2025 · gamenode.app · its alternatives →
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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…
2025 · play-maker.io · its alternatives →
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I wanted to learn more about RAG implementations, so I built something to solve the constant digging through manuals whenever we play a game. It's fairly simplistic, but actually has worked pretty well for some of these conflicts. Everythings Open Source on GitHub if you're curious (or have ideas), and I'd love to hear feedback from fellow boardgamers!
2024 · gamegame.ai · its alternatives →
- 20PA
Hi hn, Its been a while since my kid has been dreaming to make videogames, as you know, the entry bar is high, too many technical details are involved. A few months ago, we started making games, we have tried many different ways, from dragging blocks to write code with a high-level library to make it simple, it is still too much work. Getting into the AI boat, I decided to give it a try for making games, turns out that it works super nicely, still, you still have many technical concepts involved, what language should the game be written in? where do you store the file/assets? how do you…
2024 · playcodeai.com · its alternatives →
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I had a dream on Nov 21, 2019 of a game. I woke up at 4:00pm that day, started programming it then, and 7 and 1/2 hours later, it was done. It's about you and a pink square going exploring. - otdav33/spelunko
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I’m Thijs, new to the community and excited (and a bit nervous) to share what I’ve been working on: it's called Prototyper. The motivation: I was curious how much more "taste" you could get out of an LLM if you built the entire infra yourself: tool calling, code execution, rendering—instead of layering on top of existing stacks. Over the past year I built a custom compiler, runtime, and design engine from scratch to see if this could make LLM-driven design genuinely better. A few details: - Own compiler + code runtime → no shadcn, no third-party UI kit, no external execution layer. -…
2024 · getaprototype.com · its alternatives →
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VSCode extension with games (Snake, Plinko, slots), HN/LessWrong reader, and Pomodoro timer for AI coding wait times. Fake currency only. Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TouchGra... Built in a week with Claude Code after seeing Chad IDE get ratio'd for integrating real gambling. Happy to answer questions or get roasted on the code.
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The simple way to get organised with custom foam inserts
2020 · toolkaiser.com · its alternatives →
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