Alternatives
Products that do what Mochia, a virtual pet browser game, built with Rust, SolidJS, Postgres does
Around three years ago, I was reminiscing about how much I loved playing Neopets as a kid. Meanwhile, I was also looking for a project to better learn Rust and SolidJS. So.. I figured making my own virtual pet browser game would be a fun way to practice! Since then, I’ve been working on it nearly every day, and.. it’s grown quite a bit! Here are some bulleted lists for your convenience: Technical Details: * Backend monolithic Rust server runs on a single $5/month VPS * Lean frontend with just 3 dependencies (SolidJS, Solid Router, and Mutative) * Around 130,000 combined lines of code…
- 1IM
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
- 2IB
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
- 3AO
I made a game (https://polyfight.io/) which revolves around a player (a tank) leveling up and upgrading by killing shapes and other tanks (partially inspired by https://diep.io). It has a bunch of features, a vast number of tanks, an inbuilt chatting system, clans to make teams with your friends, a colour scheme maker, controllable sandboxes which can be public or private, a last man standing gamemode, and an inbuilt 1v1 system with its own ELO rankings and a global leaderboard. The game has a few players right now, and I'd hope to spread the joy players have with…
2024 · polyfight.io
- 4IM
I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…
2022 · battle-of-flags.com
- 5IV
Hi HN! Thanks for your attention to my post. It was a big challenge to run most of Node.js packages in browser, fast moreover. Virtual File system, resolve import/export. I got cold many times, depressions, burned out, yet still alive and finished it. Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of positive feedback. There are 200,000 monthly unique users. I work full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest - I am happy after many years of hard work.
2022 · playcode.io
- 6AA
Earlier this year, we released our open-source game engine [0] built with Rust, WebAssembly, and WebGPU. Today, we’re happy to announce the Ambient platform, which brings web deployment, server hosting, and more to the runtime. With Ambient, you can make a game, deploy it to the browser in one command, share your URL and instantly play with others, no downloads or installs needed. Our WASM use is innovative; it is being used as both a sandboxed runtime for user code, and as a way to run the entire Ambient runtime in the browser. This, paired with our ECS data model, enables a highly modular…
2023 · ambient.run
- 7IM
Modd.io is a collaborative game editor that runs in browser. It's kind of like Figma for game dev. We made this engine low-code and multiplayer-first, so developeres can quickly prototype casual multiplayer games. I hope some of you guys will find this useful. Would love to hear feedback also. Thank you. Engine Demo: https://www.modd.io
2023 · github.com
- 8LA
I built LocalGPT over 4 nights as a Rust reimagining of the OpenClaw assistant pattern (markdown-based persistent memory, autonomous heartbeat tasks, skills system). It compiles to a single ~27MB binary — no Node.js, Docker, or Python required. Key features: - Persistent memory via markdown files (MEMORY, HEARTBEAT, SOUL markdown files) — compatible with OpenClaw's format - Full-text search (SQLite FTS5) + semantic search (local embeddings, no API key needed) - Autonomous heartbeat runner that checks tasks on a configurable interval - CLI + web interface + desktop GUI - Multi-provider:…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 9CA
Hello HN! I've been working on Canine for about a year now. It started when I was sick of paying the overhead of using stuff like Heroku, Render, Fly, etc to host some web apps that I've built. At one point I was paying over $400 a month for hosting these in the cloud. Last year I moved all my stuff to Hetzner. For a 4GB machine, the cost of various providers: Heroku = $260 Fly.io = $65 Render = $85 Hetzner = $4 (This problem gets a lot worse when you need > 4GB) The only downside of using Hetzner is that there isn’t a super straightforward way to do stuff like: - DNS management / SSL…
2025 · github.com
- 10AD
To try it out, simply build the project yourself from source, or use attached bootable ISO image of the system (in Releases on Github) and run it in QEMU. https://blog.vxn.dev/rou2exos-rusted-edition
2025 · github.com
- 11AR
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
- 12DB
Hi HN, I'm excited to share my open source project, a browser orchestrator. It's purpose is to make it easy to manage many browser profiles on one system. Currently it only works on MacOS, but since I've built it using Tauri (which is a Rust backend and TypeScript frontend), I expect to add Linux and Windows support in the future. I've built it primarily for myself as I use a lot of browsers and having an easy way to manage all of my profiles would make (have made, actually) my dock less cluttered haha. Also, part of why I built it is because as someone who doesn't really care about…
2025 · donutbrowser.com
- 13AM
"Game" is a stretch, but I put together this repo containing a pure Rust app which uses SDL2 and compiles to WASM (and can be run in a browser). Older resources were a bit out of date and a bit too verbose for my purposes, so here's a minimal working example.
2024 · github.com
- 14MJ
Hi HN, I’m sharing mochi.js (https://github.com/0xchasercat/mochi), a Bun-native, raw-CDP browser automation framework. It's designed to make programmatic browser use more effective by focusing on consistency and measured parity with regular traffic, purely from the JS layer, against stock Chromium. The most common forms of browser automation focus heavily on client-side line by line probes, which are mostly cosmetic. This makes people feel better but it doesn't have much relevance to actual WAF or anti-automation defences. Mochi.js focuses on what actually matters,…
May 2026 · mochijs.com
- 15DP
Hi HN, For the past few months we’ve been building dotlottie-rs, a new Lottie and dotLottie player that aims to run everywhere with smooth, high frame rate rendering and guarantee visual and feature support consistency across a large number of platforms and device types. It is lightweight, has low resource requirements and is performant. It is MIT-licensed and is available at: https://github.com/LottieFiles/dotlottie-rs The player is written in Rust and uses a minimal number of external dependencies. We utilize uniffi-rs to generate FFI bindings for Kotlin, Swift, and…
2024 · github.com
- 16CA
Code is here: https://github.com/bebrws/bevy-snake I had a lot of fun practicing Rust and Learning some Bevy concepts with this repository. Bevy has an incredibly powerful dependency injection system and follows a pattern called ECS which makes it very powerful (and new to me). This simple < 300 lines of code might help with learning some Bevy concepts. It also shows how to copmile for the web/WASM and inject a canvas for the game (or use a pre existing div).
2024 · bbarrows.com
- 17SD
Hello HN! Hope you are well. I'm creating my first video game. It's nowhere near complete, but I am eager for feedback, so here I am! My game is a digital ant farm. You should think SimAnt + Tamagotchi. Here's a picture: https://i.imgur.com/dIJaraG.png It's written in Rust/Bevy, compiled to WASM, and is open-source, https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants. Fair warning, though, this is my first time writing in Rust/Bevy. My goal is to give people cute ants that do cute ant stuff 24/7, ask people to look after their ants and to feed them…
2023 · ant.care
- 18AP
So, after years of abandoning Rust after the hello world stage, I finally decided to do something substantial. It started with simple line rendering, but I liked how it was progressing so I figured I could make a reasonably complete PSX style renderer and a game with it. My only dependency is SDL2; I treat it as my "platform", so it handles windowing, input and audio. This means my Cargo.toml is as simple as: [dependencies.sdl2] version = "0.35" default-features = false features = ["mixer"] this pulls around 6-7 other dependencies. I am doing actual true color 3D rendering (with Z buffer,…
Sep 2025 · totenarctanz.itch.io
- 19IM
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
- 20CQ
I'm building a cozy multiplayer game engine (very early stages - just a few days in!) combining Elixir, Go, and Godot to achieve sub-50ms latency while maintaining a warm, welcoming feel. My architecture uses Elixir/Phoenix for fault-tolerant session management, Go for high-performance game state sync (1ms tick rate), and Godot for client-side prediction. I've implemented lock-free data structures, SIMD-optimized physics, and binary protocols with delta compression. Quick note: the website/login aren't functional yet - this is a work in progress! Here's my technical deep-dive into…
2024 · tappygames.itch.io
- 21HI
This is based on an approach I made for a very high performance message and video multiplexing server. The project died, but I'm glad I get to share the a basic version with some http test code now. I admit this is the second time I've tried to show this off here today; I posted earlier but it got lost when no-one was watching :(
2011 · github.com
- 22OA
it won't let me put url for some reason, here it is: https://github.com/octopii-rs/octopii
Nov 2025
- 23IG
Hey HN, For years, my local development setup has been a fragile mess of tools that never quite played nicely together. On my mac, it was a constant battle with Homebrew services starting (or not starting) on boot, conflicting PHP and Node versions managed by `asdf` or `nvm`, and a collection of `docker-compose.yml` files that I'd copy-paste and tweak for every single project. The cognitive load was just too high. Setting up SSL was another chore involving `mkcert`. Sharing a quick demo with a colleague meant firing up ngrok. And if I wanted to run two projects that needed different versions…
Oct 2025 · servbay.com
- 24C2
Hi everyone, french web dev here, About 10 years ago I did a little party game in the browser inspired by Achtung die Kurve genre, it reached HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9494619) and everything went crazy, it's still largely played in open-spaces all over the world today. This past year, I've been working on a sequel: https://curvytron2.com is live. Same goal as the first one: challenge myself, perfect my skills, have fun and give back to the internet community the best way I know; by just putting a free little fun game out there. No ads, no tracking, no…
Jun 2026 · curvytron2.com
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