Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I hated how much my 12-year-old played Roblox, so we built our own FPS
I'm a father of two, 7 and 12. They are obsessed with Roblox, especially Rivals. Like a lot of parents, we did not love it. We tried the usual things: block it, limit it, set timers." It became a daily battle, a lose-lose situation. So I flipped the problem. Instead of fighting what they loved, I decided to lean into it, but with a twist. Why just play an FPS when you could build one together? My kids became the PMs. Claude and I became their engineer. I was shocked by how fast we moved. We picked a name, Cooked and started building. Get in. Lock in. Get cooked! In the first 3 hours, we had…
Cooked is a browser-based first-person shooter game that families can build and play together. Created by a father frustrated with his children's Roblox habit, it shifts the dynamic from passive consumption to… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1M4
2011 · audenneedham.com · its alternatives →
- 2AF
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 · its alternatives →
- 3IT
2019 · s-poony.github.io · its alternatives →
- 4IM
Hi HN! I made many small web games in the past with Unity or Phaser. But this time I wanted to make something completely on my own. So I coded a basic game framework in plain JavaScript, and used it to make Almost Pong. This was a really fun project that taught me a lot about JavaScript, and I plan to make more minimalist games with this framework. Interesting fact: Almost Pong doesn't load any assets, all sprites and sounds are generated with code. Happy to answer questions, and please let me know if you have any feedback on the game. Thanks!
2022 · lessmilk.com · its alternatives →
- 5AG
2018 · mind-circus.org · its alternatives →
- 6
I just open sourced a game I’ve been working on with my 6-year-old son Jack over Thanksgiving weekend.
2014 · johnpolacek.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Code Kingdoms▲104Learn to code with Minecraft and Roblox. Ages 8-14
2015 · codekingdoms.com · its alternatives →
- 8
I was addicted to game mechanics, so we made our own game.
2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 9MA
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 →
- 10M1
My 10 year old son Troy has made a card game. It has 27 characters, each with different powers. You can download it here https://www.dropbox.com/s/jrgphx4vn95va4z/LegimonChristmasSet2013.pdf His goal is to have 100 kids play it, and he wants to give it away free as a Christmas present so that more kids can play it. I have created a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/legimon . He would be ecstatic if anyone has feedback for him.
2013 · its alternatives →
- 11PA
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 →
- 12
Hi HN, I'm Oliver. I've been in the software and cloud engineering industry for a long time (28 years), and this past year genuinely changed how I think about coding. The bottleneck isn’t syntax anymore. It’s clarity. I now spend more time describing what I want, testing results, and refining instructions than writing code line by line. The spark for this project came from a presentation I gave at my son’s school in December, 2025. I expected mild interest. Instead, kids were completely engaged — hands up, pitching game ideas, iterating in real time. That made me question something I’d…
Jan 2026 · pixelarcade.studio · its alternatives →
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- 15
I built this over the holiday break with my two girls (ages 6 and 8). You pilot a UFO and beam up humans, cows, cats, dogs, and sheep for points. They drew all the art while I talked to Claude Code to scaffold the game logic. The magic moment was watching my kids use voice dictation to talk directly to Claude Code. My 8-year-old asked for a "purpler" tractor beam and watched it change in real time. She wasn’t coding, but she _was_ driving: describing what she wanted, testing the result, and iterating fast. It was really cool to watch... later on she asked me what javascript was and we dug…
Jan 2026 · studio.mfelix.org · its alternatives →
- 16ME
Hi HN! I'm a 4th grader and made this game called Mouse Escape with my dad. It's kind of like Pac-Man, but you play as a mouse escaping from humans and eating cheese! We made it together using AI and it only took 1 hour. Would love if you try it and tell us what you think :) Play here: https://www.roadcrosser.com/mouse-escape Thanks! -anonymouse
2025 · roadcrosser.com · its alternatives →
- 17
learning games for kids
2024 · easygames.online · its alternatives →
- 18
Turn a messy room into a toddler game instantly.
Feb 2026 · fundad.app · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20MW
Happy Halloween! Instead of going to a Halloween party this year, my wife and I decided to run a tiny Hackathon and built this little retro choose-your-own-adventure to pay tribute to a popular series of yesteryear. Try and escape! Also pumpkin mode!! We made liberal use of ChatGPT for code, DALLE3/Midjourney for images, but did most of the storyboarding/writing ourselves because we couldn't stand the style of GPT4/Claude.
2023 · tremella.github.io · its alternatives →
- 21
Hey HN, I'm Damiano Rodriguez, and I've been working solo on a project called Caisual Games. It's a free platform where anyone can create web games just by describing them with their voice. Here's how it works: You simply describe your game idea ("Make a cookie clicker game with 5 upgrades"), and the platform generates a playable web game in seconds using HTML and JavaScript. There's no coding required and no downloads needed—you can create and play directly in your browser. What's more, anyone can improve a published game, fostering a collaborative environment for game creation. The…
2024 · caisual.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Roblox is the ultimate virtual universe that lets you create, share experiences with friends, and be anything you can imagine. Join millions of people and discover an infinite variety of immersive experiences created by a global community!
2020 · speechly.com · its alternatives →
- 23BG
Tl;dr: Would like to hear thoughts on board games platform prototype (https://bordga.me/games/7) We are building an online board games platform which lets you create & play any board game online while video chatting with your co-players. Game play resembles the real world where users have to do everything from moving the pieces to enforcing the rules. We are quite early in our journey. We prototyped Chess to see if people would be interested in this direction. Please try it here! (https://bordga.me/games/7) You can enter your name that creates a new…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 24IC
Hello All, After going through my daughters prep interview process, the teachers advised that she needed to sharpen up on her opposites. After searching the Google Play store and being a little disappointed at the state of the opposite games, I decided to create my own version for her (I also wanted an excuse to make a kids game :) So without further ado, I give you the opposites game! :) https://oppositesgame.com/ A couple of notes: * I didn't create a scoring system as I didn't want to give the sense of "pressure" in the game * A couple of ideas have popped up in my head…
2019 · its alternatives →
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