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Products that do what I hated how much my 12-year-old played Roblox, so we built our own FPS does
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…
- 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
- 3IM
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
- 4M4
2011 · audenneedham.com
- 5
- 6IB
I've been working on an MMORPG that is now in alpha as a solo developer. Here are the major open source technologies that I use: Blender - 3D modeling software for creating the overall environment and every game object. I've gotten a lot of CC and Public Domain assets from https://poly.pizza GLTF - I export assets from blender to the GLTF asset format JSON - I write a JSON config for every game object that describes things like its name, its interactions, its collisions, etc. Node.js exporter - I iterate over the environment and every asset to create a scene hierarchy. I use…
2024 · alpha.reconquer.online
- 7M1
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
- 8AR
My background project for the last two years has been re-implementing my 2004 C++ shoot'em up game in TypeScript + WebGL, and it's finally done (just in time for the 20th anniversary!) Play the game online: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/darklaga.html Technical article about the remake: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/remake.html I have tested Firefox, Chrome and Edge on desktop and mobile (no access to a device capable of running Safari). It's amazing how much difference 20 years makes: the hardware is so much more powerful, the web…
2024 · nicollet.net
- 9PA
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
- 10AA
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
- 11
- 12IW
Apr 2026 · spectrelang.org
- 13ME
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
- 14MW
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
- 15IB
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
- 16OS
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
- 17FM
I went to the ADVANCE Hackathon in Cologne, Germany last weekend and this is a project I created together with @snnd and @newmetl. We used node.js and socket.io in the backend and HTML5 + JS in the frontend. The rules are simple: Make your and your teammates' gaming pieces fit into the highlighted area without talking to your mates. The levels are generated randomly, so they might be too easy or too hard from time to time. I'd like to emphasize that this game has been created within less than 24 hours! http://fititgame.com/ http://hackathon.advance-conference.com/ Feedback and criticism are…
2012
- 18BG
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
- 19IC
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
- 20
- 21AM
Hi everyone! I'm one of the developers behind this project. I wrote it with my two brothers, Daniel and Ricardo. For years the three of us have been curious about how multiplayer games work, which is why we decided to work on this project. Our goal was to gain a deep understanding of how different players can share the same 3D space, which is why we wrote our own tiny game engine instead of using something like Unity. We wrote the engine using C++ and OpenGL, and we then compiled it to WebAssembly using Emscripten so that it would run effortlessly on web browsers. We are really excited about…
2022 · play.moonlightmuseum.io
- 22ZC
Zap Code generates working HTML/CSS/JS from plain English descriptions, designed for kids ages 8-16. The core loop: kid types "make a space shooter game", AI generates the code, live preview renders it immediately. Three interaction modes - visual-only tweaks, read-only code view with annotations, and full code editing with AI autocomplete. Technical details: Next.js frontend, Node.js backend, Monaco editor simplified for younger users, sandboxed iframe for preview execution (no external API calls from generated code). Progressive complexity engine uses a skill model to decide when…
Mar 2026 · zapcode.dev
- 23MC
After three years of joyful experiments I'm glad to present you the result of them. Mariocraft is a SMB web project based solely on HTML5/CSS/JS, without canvas. The whole idea behind it was to create a community in order to build and share new kind of SMB experience. To achieve this goal, I focused most of my efforts on the editor, making it as easy to use for beginners without forgetting about advanced users (shortcuts, etc.) I tried to create overall design which matches subject of my nostalgia – the 80's. Hence, you'll have the pleasure to encounter less fancy effects and more…
2013
- 24WM
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
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