Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I made a Doom-like game fit inside a QR code
I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…
The Backdooms is a Doom-inspired game compressed into a 2.4KB HTML file that runs directly from a QR code in the browser. Built as a week-long project, it combines raycasting technology similar to the original Doom… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1D1
I made a Doom source port that runs within a PDF file. I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method. It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and…
2025 · doompdf.pages.dev · 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 →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 4
Apr 2026 · spectrelang.org · its alternatives →
- 5
TrueType fonts have a hinting VM that grid-fits glyphs. It has a stack, storage area, conditionals, function calls, and it turns out it's Turing-complete. So I built a raycasting engine in the hinting bytecode. The glyph "A" in the font has 16 vertical bar contours. The hinting program reads player coordinates from font variation axes via GETVARIATION, does DDA ray marching against a tile map in the storage area, and repositions bar heights with SCFS. It ends up looking like a crude Wolfenstein-style view. Small visuzlization:…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6DI
2024 · chrisdalke.com · its alternatives →
- 7TP
This is the inevitable post after jeff_harris released restful-doom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919534 twitch-plays-doom is a Python Twitch IRC->restful-doom proxy to control doomguy with a staggering 8 second delay. The project was Saturday night's 'I wonder if I can make this work' session. Since it's been live there has been a team of four successfully make it to half way through E01M01. I've since added godmode to the chat (you can guess the command). This was fun, hope others get some enjoyment out of it. Twitch Stream/Chat…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 8MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
- 9
Hi HN, I’ve been working on Gore – a port of the classic Doom engine written in pure Go, based on a ccgo C-to-Go translation of Doom Generic. It loads original WAD files, uses a software renderer (no SDL or CGO, or Go dependencies outside the standard library). Still has a bit of unsafe code that I'm trying to get rid of, and various other caveats. In the examples is a terminal-based renderer, which is entertaining, even though it's very hard to play with terminal-style input/output. The goal is a clean, cross-platform, Go-native take on the Doom engine – fun to hack on, easy to read,…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Wadzilla is currently a PoC. Although in theory it “works”, it does not create an entertaining experience as a game, although to me it is quite fun just too see it output ZIL for all of the rooms in a DOOM WAD, with all of the objects in all of their correct locations by their plain English names, along with the 8-character names for the textures of the walls, floors, and ceilings in their relative positions in the room. Part of that enjoyment of course comes from knowing what it entails just to get that far, so the amount of entertainment you derive from that may be far less. In fact, I…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Playground for the fire effect from DOOM. Really simple algorithm and all experiments are welcome! - filipedeschamps/doom-fire-algorithm
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
I just had this really fun idea of making a playable version of DOOM on my GitHub profile after building "Doom" in a QR code last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43729683) and I finally stopped procrastinating to try and build it. DoomMe is DOOM E1M1 map that can run on GitHub's markdown viewer which doesn't support javascript, web assembly or even iframes it works with a stateless engine with a capture of every possible position in the map (with 64 unit distance) captured in 4 directions and stitched together using graph logic with 8000+ WebP images and markdown…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
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 · its alternatives →
- 14
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5uygzEmdLw Hi HN, I built a RISC-V emulator that implements the RV32IM instruction set and a minimal syscall interface to run DOOM. A few weeks ago, I got my first output with a simple hello world assembly program. Since then I have been working tirelessly to get DOOM to run. I needed to figure out how to run C programs first, and came across newlib, which allows the underlying environment to implement the syscall stubs one by one until the programs run. I have also added ELF loading, but currently only a single `PT_LOAD` segment is…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
A simple text-based adventure game. Contribute to skx/lighthouse-of-doom development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16AR
I think it's finally time to lock version 0.2 of my 4d side project. (Since previous Show HN a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100760 I scrapped lots of stuff and concentrated on making a javascript "game engine") The sole purpose of this project is to explore whether it's possible to make the human brain spatially aware of four dimensions using Virtual Reality. It’s my first ever game project, my first time using Unity, first time writing C#, and my first anything with WebXR, so please be gentle! To manage expectations, it isn't visually pleasing…
2025 · brainpaingames.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hey, ever wanted to fully understand or tweak a nostalgic game that you love? So, I’m documenting my journey on matching decompiling a retro game, step by step, using AI and self-made tools. Three chapters are done, and the fourth is in progress. Matching decompilation is a fun reverse engineering challenge that paves the way to learn more about a game and fully customize it. Let me know your thoughts about my posts and the VS Code extension that I'm developing, called Kappa! Have you ever heard of matching decompilation, by the way?
2025 · gambiconf.substack.com · its alternatives →
- 18
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 · its alternatives →
- 19
Made this during COVID. I was into PICO-8 at the time and saw someone ported DOOM to it. I'm more of a text adventure guy, so I decided to port ADVENT. Basically I wrote a FORTRAN-to-Lua transpiler. The hardest part was figuring out what version of FORTRAN the source code was written in, finding a manual, cramming it into the limited cartridge space, but most of all, wrapping my mind around the data file format. Always admired Will Crowther for making this. Very fun project. I recorded myself during the whole process but I never posted a video. Future work maybe.
2024 · lexaloffle.com · its alternatives →
- 20
GitHub: https://github.com/TeamHypersomnia/Hypersomnia - The netcode relies on full simulation determinism - this includes Box2D physics. I'm using standard floating-point calculations and rely on IEEE754 compliance. I also use STREFLOP for portable math function implementations. This is commonly done for RTS games with a lot of synchronized units, however this technique is rarely if ever seen in games with complex physics, esp. shooters. - The atlas packer I wrote for the game was reused in Assassin's Creed, Skydio and received 2 scientific references:…
2024 · hypersomnia.io · its alternatives →
- 21
My wife and I recently submitted to a mobile game jam on Newgrounds (yes, it's still around). What started as a question of whether we could do it somehow morphed into whether we could do without so many of the seemingly needless complications rampant in our respective industries. My wife thus did all the art as traditional frame-by-frame animation (no puppets or tweening) and I preceded without a game engine. I did use a pre-processor that gives JS a Lisp syntax (Parenscript), because C-syntax is gross. We hope the end result, while definitely of small scope, will serve to inspire some…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hello everyone! I've finally finished my latest side project - a RPG game made in Blazor. It started as a small project to learn some Blazor (I'm .NET dev but kept mainly to backend and ASP.NET). I had such a good time coding it that at some point I decided to make a full featured game out of it. I might've have bitten off more that I could chew as RPGs have so many systems and elements but overall I think it worked out well, especially for a single person project. I want to hop on the next project soon so any comments/questions/tips than can make me better really appreciated!
2024 · whimsicalwyrm.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 23MF
I know everyone is a bit burned out on blockchain and cryptocurrency related stuff around these parts, but I've been working on as a side project for the last few months and thought you guys might be interested: https://cryptoempire.io/ It's still a bit buggy and incomplete (the mobile ux needs a lot of work, the leaderboard isn't functional yet, etc.), but I've reached a point where I'm not totally ashamed of sharing it :) Any feedback would be most welcome!
2018 · its alternatives →
- 24
A game made with vanilla JS and HTML5 Canvas. The goal is to trap bouncing balls by drawing boundaries over them but the balls hate your cursor so they will try to run away. --There is a paint pollock option. It's inspired by jackson pollock, the painter. if you let it run for 5,6 minutes, the screen will turn into a pollock painting (-ish). --It was a fun personal project.
30d ago · deepanwadhwa.github.io · its alternatives →
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