Alternatives
Products that do what I left my FAANG job at 50 to build a sci-fi game does
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…
- 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
- 2IG
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…
2025
- 36M
2013 · playadrift.com
- 41M
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
- 5MA
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
- 6IR
2023 · store.steampowered.com
- 7IR
It took me 20 months to develop it in my spare time. I used Unity game engine, I did not have any game dev experience before. It was more complex that I thought at the begining, I spent lots of time on promotion, marketing, founding company, learning about the legal aspects of different parts, for example music. Some parts were easier than I expected. Unity makes it very easy to build for all three operating systems (Win, MacOs, Linux), I am not sure why more game devs are not using this possibility. I also like working on Steam as distribution system. It is not exactly easy for a newcomer,…
2022 · store.steampowered.com
- 8IB
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
- 9OS
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
- 10FA
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
- 11OC
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
- 12WI
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
- 13IM
Thank you https://opengameart.org for your service. People like me who can't draw or compose music are in your debt. The game, "Glitch and Rush" has been made in a few hours here and there. I've been tinkering in GameDev for years, if not decades, but I never released anything. The goal here was simple: - come up with a core mechanic - implement a single level - add some polishing - RELEASE I hope you'll enjoy it. BTW, my best time is 2min23s (yes, I'm bad at my own game, it's ok, I'm ok).
2022 · linkdd.itch.io
- 14IB
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
- 15IB
I'm working on the Survival Crafting RPG that you would have played on your Apple II back in the '80s. You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based UI of the old Ultima games. It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot. I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. It's complete up through the Bronze Age (in Valheim terms). Let me know what you think!…
May 2026
- 16IC
Stack: WASM + Rust + Macroquad I saw that a company had posted a cool job ad where you had to apply directly via a REST API. That gave me the idea to gamify my resume as well. Since I was bored, I vibe coded a bit and voilà, the result was ready. I think it's something new and fun that might put a smile on people's faces. (Please don't spam my email address, but feel free to send me an email with your high score if you want!)
Feb 2026 · breezko.dev
- 17IV
Coding agent management is all the rage right now, and many tools are being created to fill the gap. As a power user for all tools I've used since I've started my software engineering career, I've always taken the time to test multiple tools thoroughly before deciding on one, and an agentic manager was no different. I've tested many tools, but ultimately landed on Agent of Empires (AoE for short). Why ? Because it's fast, the development is active and it's feature complete, and easy to contribute to. So I did (contribute). In my day to day workflow for my job, I need the ability to start…
May 2026 · github.com
- 18IM
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
- 19MG
This weekend I participated in my first hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt, and built an HTML5 game with a few people that I met at the event. We got honorable mention, putting us in the top 6 teams of 104 competing. I'm looking for some feedback on the game, so here it is: http://venturecrapital.us Source: https://github.com/wylieconlon/Venture-Crapital https://github.com/dmitric/venturecrapital-server
2011
- 20IM
Hello HackerNews, I'm Kaamkiya, the author of this program. It's a collection of minimal games made for terminals, like 2048, Hangman, and even two player games like pong. They're all text-based, but they can actually be quite fun. If you want to test it right now, you can do this: go run github.com/Kaamkiya/gg@latest I started this project out of boredom, honestly. I was bored, and when I'm bored I like to code or play video games. So I coded video games. I kept them really minimal though, because I'm not great at gamedev and thought it would be easier to contribute to text-based…
2024 · github.com
- 21IB
I've built a job platform for technical roles called "Cracked Engineers". If you want to land a job with some of the world's best AI/tech startups - my goal is to make this the go-to place for that. YouTube walk-through can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmuIOdES7mQ A huge thank you to Weaviate (Bob van Luijt & team), Unsloth AI (Daniel Han & Mike), OpenPipe (David Corbitt), Julius AI (Rahul Sonwalkar), Jimini AI (Luis F Voloch) for using the platform while in beta and posting first paid posts. So, why did I build it? Well, over the past period a lot of…
2024 · crackedengineers.com
- 22AS
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
- 23IM
Hey HN, I'm Aydin, a 13-year-old developer and indie maker looking to improve the world with my small startups. Recently, I built 2 micro SaaS projects. I spent days & weeks coding features, always telling myself that after coding one more feature I was for sure to get traction. This never happened. The reason: I never launched. With IndieReq, you can launch your startup fast and get real user feedback so you know exactly what features to ship and improve. All you have to do is sign up for free, create a feedback board, and share the public link with your users. It's that easy! If you've…
2025 · indiereq.com
- 24AA
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
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