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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I'm organizing a vibe coding game dev competition

Hi everyone, I just saw a vibe coded game on HN, and thought maybe I should post about this here. I'm organizing a vibe coding game dev competition called Vibe Jam. Last year we did it too and there was 1000+ games submitted. This year the deadline is May 1 and you can submit your games until then. There's $35,000 in prizes with the Gold prize being $20,000. Let me know what you think! -Pieter

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, I have been making side projects since I was 14, and my team mate (this is his very first side project! Congrats!) designed and implemented the UI. Over time, people kept asking me how they could start coding and turn ideas into reality. So we had an idea. Coding is changing. With AI, the bottleneck is no longer writing every line by hand but knowing how to prompt effectively to reach a working outcome. Our objective is not to make people code better, or even learn to be a proficient software engineer, but just to keep it simple and start building. We want to remove fear and barriers…

    2025 · 100vibecoding.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Vibe-code your game animations and spritesheets

    Dec 2025 · gamelabstudio.co · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I have lots of free time.

    Nov 2025 · theboard.stavros.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4WM

    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 · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Fully leaned into vibe coding this time around. Started on v0, at some point ejected into running locally (getting v0's exported folder to run locally was a challenge), then iterated with Cursor over the course of a few hours. Really neat how much can be accomplished just conversationally these days.

    2025 · macrodata-refinement.arjit.me · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    AI game maker. Got a game idea? Just describe it and start playing in seconds. Create game-ready art and animated sprite sheets in any style. Browse and play community games. Share your games with friends.

    Dec 2025 · playmix.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    My kids are surprisingly keen to learn to type, and I couldn't find any thing out there which was A) Free without adverts B) Worked well on mobile/tablets C) Was clutter free and easy to use I wondered how easily I could vibe code a solution. Here's the result. Everything here was "vibe coded" to an extent, the graphics, sounds, art-work, even the github pipelines ( and I used chatgpt to instruct me how to configure everything in AWS ) I'm particularly pleased with the phoneme game, https://free-kids-typing-games.com/games/phoneme-sound-lab/ which was crafted…

    Dec 2025 · free-kids-typing-games.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Spin and get random app ideas to vibe code

    Jan 2026 · promptroulette.dev · its alternatives →

  10. 10OC

    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 · its alternatives →

  11. 11VC

    I've been using Cursor, Co-Pilot, ChatGPT, Claude and what not since quite some time now, and we are at a stage where we can just "vibe code" whole apps from idea to execution in a few prompts. I tried this personally to create some side projects that solved little problems for me. But I always got stuck at a point where it just goes into an infinite loop of issues and can't solve the issue by itself. Well I'm a developer, so it's easier for me to dive into the code and solve the problem myself, but that would take a hell lot of time to understand all the code AI wrote for me. If I keep…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    It took me about a week to vibe code this 3D game engine with Opus 4.6 that I intend to use as a replacement for Three.js and React Three Fiber in my browser MMORPG, Mana Blade. I was not expecting to be able to reach that point so easily, but pretty much every feature took somewhere between 30 minutes and 1 hour - 1 to 3 prompts on average. It is vibe-coded in the sense that I haven't looked at the code, but I am very careful with my prompts and constantly have Claude reviewing the codebase, looking for performance and code quality improvements. It can reach 2000 draw calls on recent…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13KY

    Hey HN! I wanted to practice "vibe coding" and see how far and fast I can go by only prompting, without actual coding. I decided to make a simple CLI app that scrapes web docs into a single md file (I was annoyed that LLM keeps writing Tailwind 3 code for a Tailwind 4 project). In just a couple of hours, the CLI app was ready! Then iterated on arguments for another couple of hours. Result: https://github.com/vladstudio/web2llm Then I decided to go further and "productize" the CLI by making a web app for it. Another half-day, and the web app is ready!…

    2025 · web2llm.dev · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    3hours to make, 100% vibe coding inspire by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39159418

    Oct 2025 · verse8.io · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I was going through my app subscriptions and realized I was paying $15 for a pretty good workout app, which seemed a bit high to me. As a software engineer who is also well versed in claude code, I realized that I could likely vibecode a very similar app, or even build something more to my liking. I challenged my self to build something roughly equivalent this afternoon. Workflow was: start with a detailed spec from Claude code describing many of the features common in workout apps. Then paste this into lovable to have it build out the initial mvp. Once that was built, I used claude code…

    Dec 2025 · strengthquest.lovable.app · its alternatives →

  16. 16IB

    I had an idea for this concept for a while and decided to build a little website around it. It's kind of a silly idea but I'm really curious to see how it plays out. If you're a particularly curious person, be warned. By submitting a payment to the game, you get to see how many other people were curious enough to play. You will be ranked based on your payment amount, and get to discover some interesting insights about the game's dynamics. Hope you like it

    2024 · thecuriositygame.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    I'm calling this "Vibe Discovery" — distinct from vibe coding because I didn't know the requirements upfront. Started with "make something with the accelerometer" and discovered through 6 iterations that I wanted a WebGL marble game. The interesting part was the dev setup: Claude Code running in Termux on a Redmi Note 9 (4GB RAM). The same-device feedback loop — code, test accelerometer, react, iterate — made rapid discovery possible in a way that laptop-to-phone deployment wouldn't.

    Jan 2026 · kikkupico.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18IC

    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 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    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 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    I know vibe coding is controversial. I wanted to give it a try so over the last ~4 weeks I tried vibe coding a blender/houdini inspired node based 3d geneartion app in my spare time. The original goal was to try to generate great looking 3d environments from relatively small data. Most games download megs or gigs of data and that's no good for web based things. If you're an AI skeptic still, maybe seeing more concretely what's possible today might convince you otherwise? I'm not making any claim the code is good, though I'm also not claiming is bad. I had fun giving it a try. I was…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Vibe coding arena for people to practice and have fun

    May 2026 · vibecodebattle.online · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    As an experiment I let Claude Code write 100% of the code to begin a project management application. Total spent: $30 Time: 2hours I did this so showcase what Claude produces and to also get feedback on how well you think it did.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hey HN! I started building VIBESxCODED to bring everything I wanted as a developer into one space — prompt-based app generation, live preview, and deployment flows. Still early, still building in public. Would love feedback — brutal honesty welcome.

    2025 · vibescoded.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24AW

    I have a YouTube channel (rithmic) that helps people to learn how to code. I have built this job board for them. Let me know your thoughts...

    2024 · webdevjobs.io · its alternatives →

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