Alternatives
Products that do what I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam does
I was at FB/Meta from late 2013 to early 2023, mostly working in the compiler/runtime spaces. I got hit in the spring 2023 layoff wave. I immediately started making games in my newfound free time (a lifelong interest, and I even worked in AA(A?) back ca. ~2000), and in October 2023 I stumbled upon the idea of a roguelike pachinko/plinko game inspired by Luck Be A Landlord. Things snowballed quickly, I started talking to publishers, then worked like crazy through all of 2024, almost the hardest I've ever worked in my career, and launched the game in December 2024. It's sold…
- 1MA
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
- 21M
Howdy, long time HN'er. Spent ~20 years in FAANG and startups, got the pink slip during a big layoff wave in spring 2023. That's ok, I was about to quit anyway :) Finally got back to a lifelong goal of mine, making an "indie" game. (Indie is subjective, but you get the drift.) So, here it is: Ballionaire, a "fast-paced pachinko roguelike where strategy meets physics to create outrageous wealth!" My influences were: Plinko(TM), Luck Be A Landlord, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. I was really fortunate because localthunk, the dev behind Balatro, noticed my game during its first month of…
2024 · store.steampowered.com
- 3IL
I am a 50-year-old who left a FAANG Engineering Manager job to build a sci-fi game. I just released Outsider, a sci-fi narrative game with multiple endings. If you want to support my work, the game is now 15% off (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/). I've always wanted to create a game. I moved from Brazil to the US to work at Big Tech, but after a career of customer focus, mission alignment and 360-degree feedback, I wanted to experience solo game development. While FAANG can be soul-crushing at times, I had a great manager and an amazing team. The pay and…
Nov 2025
- 4IB
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
- 5OS
We did a "Show HN post" 6 months back of our startup and we're very excited to show everyone how far we've come as well as the lessons we've learnt so far! It's been a roller-coaster so far and we think there's lot more of the same to come! We did apply for Ycombinator funding but got turned down :( But may re-apply soon :) For those that don't know, our startup is called Scirra and we make Construct 2 which is an HTML5 game engine (http://www.scirra.com). Our engine allows anyone to make HTML5 games without knowing any programming. It's only me and my brother working on this and we're based…
2012
- 6CA
Hello everyone, We just launched a side-project we have been building over the last couple of months -- Coderoulette is a pair programming game for developers, like a Chatroulette for hackers. We match developers in real time and give them coding challenges they have to solve doing pair programming using a collaborative IDE and video conference. You can check it out here: https://www.coderoulette.com/ We also published an article explaining how we built it. I'd love to hear your feedback.…
2016
- 7WI
Game development used to be something I dabbled in and off, and despite having chosen to major in Computer Science to follow a career in the field, I never managed to establish any consistency with it. So I relegated this aspiration to the realm of pipe dreams, something whose idea I preferred to the actual process of doing it, and I continued working as a software engineer. This only changed after a disruption to my job: the fintech I worked for got acquired by a big traditional bank and we were absorbed into their ranks. Long story short: it wasn't a culture fit. After six months, I…
Mar 2026 · cauldron.itch.io
- 8MW
This was more of a sandbox to play with Raphael and Flot than anything else but I think there are some interesting statistics in there. It'd be awesome to do this over time but I really don't have the spare time required.
2011 · burntbrunch.github.com
- 9IW
I was a software engineer at a late stage startup and was caught in a layoff this January. When I looked into exercising my options or getting liquidity, I realized the secondary market is a total black box. Liquidity funds spend a fortune on Google Ads just to find people like us. Those high marketing costs eventually come out of our pockets in the form of higher fees and worse terms. I built StrikeRates to change that. The site is meant to be a central resource for anyone navigating this. I included a Liquidity 101 section that explains the different financial vehicles because that…
Mar 2026 · strikerates.com
- 10MF
I quit my job a month ago and have been heads down working on my startup. It's my first time working with Ruby or web development at all. I launched on the 7th - http://www.onefatpig.com Now I'm done with the easy part (code) and working on the substantially harder part (getting users). Any advice?
2011
- 11FA
Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com
- 12OC
Hi Hacker News! My Co Co-op Matt and I are on a work term and were given the task of building a webapp that could make $20 in four weeks as our onboarding challenge. We're in the final stretch here and would sure appreciate HN's thoughts (we realize we kind of did this backwards, building something first before talking to people who might use it, but hey! We're leaning.). So basically, we tried to apply game dynamics to retaining visitors to websites by offering a reward (ie. discount coupon / premium content, etc.) for meeting various 'objectives' (ie. pages to visit). We call it ScavSite…
2011
- 13IC
I have been in the position plenty of times where I am trying to get my game out there and there just aren't a lot of places to do it. Product Hunt is great... but it's a little restricting and difficult if you don't have an in to post. So I created Game Hunt. The goal is to help with the exposure of a game to people who might not otherwise get exposure to it. Here's the link http://gamehunt.co/ Any feedback would be great!
2016
- 14HA
I'm building a manually curated catalog of games made by the HN community. I'v found several small gems while browsing HN, and it would've been quite difficult to find those games otherwise. So I've started a personal quest to collect those games into a public catalog with open source code and open data (everything is available on GitHub: https://github.com/labarilem/hn-games). Currently the collection has data up to the end of 2022. The plan, of course, is to gather all data up to today and then keep updating the collection. I've published this early version of the…
2025 · hackernews.games
- 15SE
Hey, I've shared this game while it was still a work in progress in one of the Tell HN threads. I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of people tried it, and I got some positive feedback and constructive criticism. Anyway, I found a gamedev library I really like - Kaplay [1]. What I like about it is that easy things are easy. Meaning I could have fun building the game without learning (or fighting) a new tool. I always wanted to make games, but this is the first one I actually did. And I have to tell you - game development sparks joy! It combines so many things (game design, programming,…
Jan 2026 · muffinman-io.itch.io
- 16
- 17MG
2011 · meta.gamify.com
- 18IG
Here's a video of it in action https://twitter.com/i/status/1667355251773526016 I didn't end up using it that much back then and no one else seems to have cared it existed, but it was a project I used to derust my programming skills and I'm to this day proud of the flamboyant design. To anyone reading this: you don't have to let your old code rot away in the graveyard of distant memories just because times change. With enough persistence and a little perseverance anything is possible. Code doesn't have an expiration date. -day
2023 · github.com
- 19WM
Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…
2014
- 20ST
Hi HN! I brought my favorite game from Palm OS to the web as a hobby project. In Space Trader, you can trade goods, hunt bounties, amass a fortune, buy a moon and retire. One of the parts of this project I enjoyed the most: To aid debugging and unit testing, I use a deterministic random number generator called GameRand. In debug mode, I can capture the random seed and log of every action taken in the game. Then I can replay that to reproduce a bug or create a test. I ended up creating nearly exhaustive test coverage this way. A write-up with more technical details and links to source code:…
2024 · memalign.github.io
- 21IB
Hey, A bit of context.. So I think last week was my last straw, I hit 8k hours with dota and holy ** It finally hit me how much time I wasted on that game. I'm a software developer, I always wanted to develop something and put it out but was scared shitless to do so, I was kinda afraid to get bad traction, to fail or even worse to be completely ignored. so I decided to address two of these issues at once, stop playing dota and spend the weekend building a website that let you see what you could've done with your gaming hours. As an avid gamer for the last 20+ years, I know that it's only…
Apr 2026 · alternatelife.xyz
- 22IB
I built a website for games that catch my eye or have something interesting going on. I made it for fun but then updating became a habit. Maybe you'll find your next "must-play" game here? GitHub repo: https://github.com/RaycatWhoDat/games-list
Nov 2025 · alistof.games
- 23AS
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
- 24IM
I got the chance to create a whimsical game about their latest Adaptive Pricing feature, despite Stripe being a very serious financial company. I'm in an interesting place being able to be paid to make games for a non-gaming tech company.
2024 · priceadapter.com
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