Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I open sourced a game I just released on Steam, written in Lua
A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
A game released on Steam in 2021 and written in Lua is now available as open source on GitHub. The game is designed for players seeking entertainment and fun. What distinguishes this project is the developer's decision… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I open sourced a game I just released on Steam, written in Lua launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IB
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 · its alternatives →
- 2
3D C++ Game Engine - yet another open source game engine - nem0/LumixEngine
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
I'm making a platform for simple open source games you can play anywhere. Games are all just JavaScript classes and you can read the source of every game on the platform. I started working on initial "games" (mostly rendering tests) in 2018 and eventually built all of the platform stuff around it to make it easy to share games. There's also an in-browser editor available for you to make and publish games all from the browser. Would love some feedback on the games and studio features as well as the platform overall. All of the code is available at https://github.com/homegamesio
Jul 2026 · homegames.io · its alternatives →
- 4
So just for fun, I wrote a complete multiplayer game in pure C++. I even wrote my own texture atlas packer, which is now used by Assassin's Creed, 2 scientific publications as well as a drone manufacturing company - each of these basically mentions the name of my game. There is even a claim that Unity patented some of the ECS ideas that originate from this project. See https://github.com/TeamHypersomnia/Hypersomnia#tech-highligh... for details. By the way the game is pretty darn good. 10 people connected yesterday to test a new map:…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5AR
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 · its alternatives →
- 6IM
Hi, I've been developing an HTML5 MMORPG game where people can submit code to play a game, like collect items, destroy defense towers or kill monsters, etc.. I've been working on this for over 1.5 yrs (all my spare time) and now it's ready for preview, does anyone want to try it out? It's mostly opensource (and the rest will be opensource sooner or later) Please access it with PC, it's an HTML5 game: https://bytelegend.com/ I really want it to expand to more languages, but right now I've only finished Java part. I wonder if anyone can help me with other languages. Besides, I'm…
2022 · bytelegend.com · its alternatives →
- 7IJ
2011 · codebrief.com · its alternatives →
- 8H0
Hello, Hacker News! My name is Lillian (see: http://about.lillian.link/), and I just released version 0.2 of my MIT-licensed game engine, Hypatia(http://lillian-lemmer.github.io/hypatia/). Hypatia is a game engine for single player 2D action adventure games. You can use it to make a game like Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Hypatia is aimed at non-programmers and programmers alike. I'm seeking any sort of feedback. Hypatia supports FreeBSD first, but has great support for just about any platform…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 9
Retro RPG Game Maker. Contribute to ericoporto/fgmk development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Hey folks — here’s a small experiment I hacked together over the weekend: https://cleoselene.com/ In short, it’s a way to build multiplayer games with no client-side game logic. Everything is rendered on the server, and the game itself is written as simple Lua scripts. I built this to explore a few gamedev ideas I’ve been thinking about while working on Abstra: - Writing multiplayer games as if they were single-player (no client/server complexity) - Streaming game primitives instead of pixels, which should be much lighter - Server-side rendering makes cheating basically…
Jan 2026 · cleoselene.com · its alternatives →
- 11MP
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 →
- 12
Homebrew engine https://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
It's free and open source. The aim is to have more transparent access to wine prefixes and the surrounding tooling (winetricks, proton configuration, etc...) per game in comparison to Lutris. Same features like statistics (time played, times launched, times crashed, and so on) per game is available in the app.
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Hello HN, Just wanted to show this little 2D game engine that I've been working on for some time (around 2 years on the editor part, longer on some of the components). It's quite full featured but obviously this a project of such magnitude already that the work never really ends. That being said it's definitely already at a point where games can made and published. The editor runs natively on Windows and Linux using Qt5. The games can run on both Win and Linux as well as on WASM with WebGL. Feature wise there's a bunch of the stuff you'd expect. Audio, graphics, scripting,…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Friendly Fire is a dialog-driven indie pixel platformer with metroidvania elements originally developed as a team effort for the game jam Ludum Dare #46 within three days. It is free to play an can be accessed via steam or browser.
2020 · friendlyfiregame.com · its alternatives →
- 16
- 17IS
Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I've just reached beta in my game BoxByte Lyte. -What is it- It's a free 3d arcade game for hardcore players that uses color matching in interesting ways. Also it's a one button game, well movement and one button. Cool huh? The final release will be free too. -What I need- This is a very challenging game, so I really need to balance the difficulty so that it's still hard but not impossible. It would be great just to hear your experiences of the game and how far in it you got. -Where can I report bugs?-…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 18
I love making small 2D pixel art games, especially using tools that have some constraints. Things like Pico-8 and the Playdate SDK are simple, fun, and allow for focusing on the game idea rather than the technical minutia. Years ago I prototyped an idea for this little game engine, Usagi, but used Rhai instead of Lua. The idea for this little game engine never went away, so I decided to finally dig in and build it. Today I released v1.0.0 of Usagi Engine after making a bunch of small games, getting feedback from developers, and stabilizing the API. It's simple, has a great developer…
May 2026 · usagiengine.com · its alternatives →
- 19
A gameboy emulator written in pure Lua. Work in progress. - zeta0134/LuaGB
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
A charming pixel art platform adventure, reminiscent of the good old 16-bit days. Served as the foundation for the retro-platformer Tiny Thor.
2023 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hello HN, I'm sharing a little open-source utility I wrote recently. I'm a huge fan of Brendan Gregg's "BPF Performance Tools" book. However, every time I SSH into a fresh server, most of the diagnostic tools aren't installed there and installing them can be really annoying. I decided to use Nix package manager and LLMs to make this process straightforward. My utility first downloads a "toolbox" of Linux utilities (built with Nix), runs Brendan Gregg's famous "60-second Linux analysis" playbook and then summarizes the results with an LLM. So "60-second Linux analysis" now becomes a single…
Mar 2026 · quesma.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Playnite▲69Provides one unified interface for your PC games
2019 · playnite.link · its alternatives →
- 23
Some time ago, I was implementing saves for my LOVE2D game. I wanted to do a full dump of the game state -- which included closures (AI), complex graphs, sets with tables as keys and also fundamentally non-serializable data (coroutines and userdata), that require user-defined serialization/deserialization logic. I went through every Lua serialization library -- none covered all data types/cases. So I wrote my own. It is a polished version, thoroughly annotated, tested and documented. It is made to be as functional and customizable as possible (or at least I did everything I could…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hey HN! I'm so excited to open source Athena Crisis under the MIT-License and fund contributions to the game and the genre. If you like the game and want to support its development, please check it out on Steam or on athenacrisis.com.
2024 · cpojer.net · its alternatives →
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