Alternatives
Products that do what Microlandia, a brutally honest city builder does
It all started as an experiment to see if I could build a game making heavy use of Deno and its SQLite driver. After sharing an early build in the „What are you working on?“ thread here, I got the encouragement I needed to polish it and make a version 1.0 for Steam. So here it is, Microlandia, a SimCity Classic-inspired game with parameters from real-life datasets, statistics and research. It also introduces aspects that are conveniently hidden in other games (like homelessness), and my plan is to continue updating, expanding and perfecting the models for an indefinite amount of time.
- 1AA
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
- 2AT
2019 · github.com
- 3TA
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 4MS
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
- 5AT
Hi HN community! We want to share AI-town, a deployable starter kit for building and customizing your own version of AI simulation - a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize. Inspired by great work from the Stanford Generative Agent paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442). A few features: - Includes a convex.dev backed server-side game engine that handles global state - Multiplayer ready. Deployment ready - 100% Typescript - Easily customizable. You can fork it, change character memories, add new sprites/tiles and you have a custom AI simulation…
2023 · github.com
- 6LP
Took a break from the falling sand simulation blog posts this week to work on another small project. It's a little pixel world generator- each time you visit, you'll see a new little world. I really like this stuff and had a blast building it yesterday!
2022 · jason.today
- 7AS
FYI, I try to release something random on the 1st and 15th of every month, this was my latest. you can see my full list of projects on my twitter: https://twitter.com/lisperati/status/1543003744161484800
2022 · dreambookgame.com
- 8IC
I built a desktop Mars colony survival game called Underhill, in homage to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Land on Mars, build solar panels and greenhouses, and try not to pass out during dust storms. Eventually your colonists split into factions: Greens who want to terraform and Reds who want to preserve Mars. There’s Chill Mode for players that just want to build & hang, and Conflict Mode that introduces the Red v. Green factions. Reds sabotage, the terrain slowly turns green as the world gets more terraformed. Feedback welcome, especially on performance and gameplay!
Feb 2026 · underhillgame.com
- 9TF
It's free to play on steam, but you'll need a computer with a dedicated graphics card. I just released a new version after first releasing it 18 months ago. It's been a hard slog to scrounge time as it's not my day job but that's life. There's a ton of obvious improvements in the future (weather systems, temperature, varying rainfall, ice/snow, more biomes, more plate tectonics, lava, etc) but all suggestions/feedback is welcome.
2023 · store.steampowered.com
- 10MJ
I’ve been working on MicroState, a city builder prototype written entirely in vanilla JavaScript using the HTML5 2D Canvas API. My goal was to see how far I could get with a 2.5D isometric style simulation with vanilla JavaScript built very simply and drawn entirely with procedural generation for maps, tiles, roads, trees, buildings, etc. The most interesting element is probably the terrain model, which allows for fairly arbitrary terrain. Although some of the generated graphics like trees are cached as sprites, buildings- which are much more intensive to draw - are not cached yet, and many…
Jan 2026 · microstate.neocities.org
- 11IB
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
- 12
- 13MI
I’ve been obsessed with simulation toys (software that allows you to play with a complex miniature world) ever since I was young and playing with SimCity and cellular automata. This kind of software exists at the delightful and weird intersection of simulation, complexity science, education, and gaming. And I want more of it! I created Microcosm Industries to initially act as a clearinghouse for simulation toys that are being built, ones that allow the user to playfully grapple with complex systems in all their interdisciplinary strangeness. But I’m also hoping that Microcosm Industries can…
Jul 2026 · microcosm.industries
- 14MP
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
- 15
As an AI you must gather training data by playing microgames
May 2026 · gathertrainingdata.com
- 16IB
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
- 17CA
Hey HN, just wanted to share a fun, vibe-coded Friday night experiment: a little playground for writing cellular automata in a subset of Rust, which is then compiled into WGSL. Since it lets you dynamically change parameters while the simulation is running via a TUI, it's easy to discover weird behaviors without remembering how you got there. If you press "s", it will save the complete history to a JSON file (a timeline of the parameters that were changed at given ticks), so you can replay it and regenerate the discovery. You can pan/zoom, and while the main simulation window is in…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 18PA
I've been working for a while on trying to curate a game that has the emergence of procedurally generated computer games but that can be played with only pen and paper. Here I present the best version I've been able to come up with that is simple and emergent. I've really enjoyed being able to engage with this sort of game while not feeling like my brain in rotting. I recon my numeracy improves while playing it.
Jun 2026 · jameshylands.co.uk
- 19
I've been rebuilding old games with Claude. While creating a modern take on SimTower and having election news on TV in the background, I had the idea to build the economy of the game around democratic socialism instead of capitalism. Instead of a real estate tycoon, you are an elected steward of the building, held responsible by the Assembly. Homes are allocated off a waitlist, dues are set on a sliding scale, and you face outside pressures from neighboring capitalist landlords. The crown jewel is attracting a large grant to establish an observatory at the top of your tower, attracting…
Aug 2026 · intergalacticrobots.app
- 20AN
Most games have limits. You can only use preset features, need coding for customization & adding mods, require expensive extra devices. We wanted to remove those barriers. That’s why we are building space zero—a browser based 3D world powered by AI. We plan to build players can freely mix items to generate unexpected creations with unique properties and sounds. Also the world itself is dynamically generated, evolving endlessly. I uploaded a demo version I’ve been working on for the past month! I hope to get any feedbacks or comments :)
2025 · 0.space
- 21SC
I was tired of games like Mafia Wars and wanted a phone-based MMO Strategy game where hundreds of players could actually engage each other on a 2D map, so I made one. I track the state of the game each night so we can display a visual timeline of territory controlled by each alliance. (example: http://bit.ly/q5CFhU) I use jQuery mobile for the front end so it runs on most phones (via Phonegap) as well as modern web browsers. The server side is handled by Java Servlets and MySQL. This started as a hobby - I'm not a developer by training - so I am very interested in feedback, suggestions, and…
2011
- 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
- 23MP
Hey all, Just reposting after about a year since the last time I shared. Micro is a platform for API development. It combines a lot of the core primitives you'd expect from a cloud platform as a single logical server. The closest equivalent is Dapr.io. It bakes in the concept of environments, source to running builds and a framework for Go development. It's useful where you want to write backend services in Go and expose them through a single API (also included in Micro). We once wrote about "Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend"…
2023 · micro.dev
- 24
Hey HN! I built https://tesana.ai/en, a game generation platform that allows anyone to create full games with graphics, game logic, and animations from a simple text prompt - without coding. Tesana has three key features 1. describe your game idea and have Tesana write a game plan for you 2. Build the game iteratively with AI, or let AI self-build the game in a build LOOP. 3) Launch the game on the web, without setting up an engine Tesana has 250 000 builders on the platform today I believe the democratization of game making is a good thing, and hopefully Tesana can help more…
20d ago · tesana.ai
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