Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to LANCommander – A self-hosted digital distribution platform for PC games
After 14 months and probably over 1,000 hours, I'm finally at the point where I feel like I can show off my side project, LANCommander. As the title states, LANCommander is a self-hosted, open source digital distribution platform for PC games. The project started to solve the woes of a regular in-person LAN party that I participate in with some friends. I got tired of spending more time solving technical issues than playing games, so I decided to create a tool to help automate the process. The server application is built as a .NET 8 Blazor application. Database access is implemented with…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. LANCommander – A self-hosted digital distribution platform for PC games launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Last week I launched LANCommander v1.0.0 after about two years of development. LANCommander is an open source digital game distribution platform. In essence, it's a ways to self-host your own game library ala Steam, GOG, Epic, etc. It originally started as a project to automate the distribution of games at a LAN party I co-host. We have about 24 peak players each session and there came a point where trying to get games to work ate more time than we actually spent playing games. The natural conclustion was to write my own launcher and server to distribute files across the network. v1.0.0…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]: > If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos. Hopefully I did that? Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize! [0]…
2024 · lanparty.house · 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
With all the turmoil in the game engine world recently, I thought I'd quickly post to show progress on our game platform dotbigbang.com. It's a fully integrated game platform where the multiplayer game editor and games all run on the web. You can make multiplayer games and share them with just a link with no setup at all. Breakdown of major features here: https://twitter.com/bobbydigitales/status/152647067103481856... We have comprehensive docs at http://docs.dotbigbang.com and a cosy Discord server at https://dotbigbang.com/discord All…
2023 · dotbigbang.com · its alternatives →
- 5
A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6MP
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 →
- 7AA
This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API. The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site. LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which…
Feb 2026 · hallucinatingsplines.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Still very much a work in progress, but really wanted to share this even in it's early state. Had heaps of fun building it to learn more about WebRTC.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
This is a little game implemented over a week of tinkering and targeting Emacs. The point is both to have fun with this kind of simulations, and also explore the "functional core / imperative shell" approach to architecture. I also developed a tile and tile effect definition DSL, which makes this even easier to extend. From this point of view it's a success: easy testing, easy extension, Gameplay-wise the simulation is too simplistic, and needs input from people interested in this kind of toys. The original Micropolis/SimSity is the last time I built a virtual city.
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 12MF
2012 · taketheblock.com · its alternatives →
- 13
- 14
Hey HN, I'm Daniel, solo dev from Germany. I built ClawHosters (https://clawhosters.com), a managed hosting platform for OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework. Quick timeline: domain registered February 5th. First paying customer six days later. I probably should have spent more time on it, but it works. If you haven't seen OpenClaw, it lets you run a personal AI assistant that connects to Telegram, Discord, Slack, and WhatsApp. Self-hosting it is absolutely possible, but it's a pain. You're dealing with Docker setup, SSL certs, port forwarding, security hardening, keeping…
Feb 2026 · clawhosters.com · its alternatives →
- 15
I wanted to learn more about RAG implementations, so I built something to solve the constant digging through manuals whenever we play a game. It's fairly simplistic, but actually has worked pretty well for some of these conflicts. Everythings Open Source on GitHub if you're curious (or have ideas), and I'd love to hear feedback from fellow boardgamers!
2024 · gamegame.ai · its alternatives →
- 16
Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…
Jan 2026 · stardesk.net · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey! Wanted to showcase this project I’ve been passionately working on. It’s an open source community platform built with the nextjs app router. There’s lots of cool features, but the main one I’m excited about is the gamification. There’s a badge and inventory system. Admins can set value to user actions like creating a post. Then a user can use their accumulated points to purchase items that have modifiers on things like your username or avatar. There’s zero vendor lock in and all you need is a: - redis server - s3 storage - smtp server Built with nextjs and prisma. Would love your…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Host your own DRM-free game library, track your stats, and share the experience with friends. It's like having your own personal Steam, but you're the one in control.
2024 · gamevau.lt · its alternatives →
- 20
I don't normally share side projects here(or in general). Don't have much time to open them up to too much attention. I started this project while riding in a car last weekend. Mainly to explore OpenAI Codex. Using Github mobile I wrote the initial specifications into the readme, and using the ChatGPT iOS app, had Codex build a simple CLI based dungeon master. Switched back to Github for managing the PRs and back and forth for the whole car ride... It kinda got a little out of hand from there, and it's now a mix of AI(mostly AI) and myself making adjustments... The first version was entirely…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
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 · its alternatives →
- 22BG
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 · its alternatives →
- 23
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 →
- 24
A professional cross-platform SSH/Sftp/Shell/Telnet/Tmux/Serial terminal. - kingToolbox/WindTerm
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →