Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Multiplayer Game Networking Demo
Hey HN! I’ve been learning about Multiplayer Game Networking to understand how clients and a server interact under different network conditions, similar to the classic demo by Gabriel Gambetta (if you haven't seen it, check it out https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/client-side-prediction-live-...). As part of this, I’ve been working on improving my own version of that demo: https://github.com/runawaytanks/demo Why I built this? I wanted to dive deeper into client-side prediction, network latency, and how to keep things in sync between the server and clients in…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Multiplayer Game Networking Demo launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

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 →
- 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
2022 · networksfromscratch.com · its alternatives →
- 4

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 →
- 5HM
Hi HN, this is Harsh, I am the developer behind Hathora. I tried making a simple multiplayer game a few years ago and, as someone with software engineering experience but no gamedev experience, I found it to be very challenging. On top of the challenges of building a single player game, you now have to constantly battle the network and latency, find ways to prevent cheating, and figure out how to make a scalable backend architecture. With Hathora my goal was to encode best practices for online multiplayer game development into a framework so developers can simply focus on implementing their…
2022 · docs.hathora.dev · its alternatives →
- 6

Hi everyone! For several months now I've been stuck on the idea of a Minesweeper game that isn't just single player. This is what I came up with: • Live games allowing several people to play at the same time • Scoring system rewarding correct moves • Grid size, mines count, and players count set to make games as balanced as possible
2025 · minesweeperpro.com · its alternatives →
- 7AC
Hello HN. This is a project me and some friends built at university in 2017. It was originally built in a rush, but we've added a few improvements over the years. It's a fun game to host at a demoparty and project on a big screen - We did that at Instanssi many times. The implementation is still rough, and suffers from the fast pace of the modern web - The frontend is likely very outdated, and the backend is built with Vapor 2 and Swift 3.1, both no longer supported. You can host this yourself, but it might be a bit of a pain to set up. The WebSocket protocol is fairly trivial to work out…
2022 · pixel.vkoskiv.com · its alternatives →
- 8

A multiplayer geography game using Websockets. Contribute to abrenaut/posio development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9

Hey HN, We’re Philip, Amby, and Declan, and we made “multiplayer virtual computers” that you can embed anywhere, including 3D spaces. We decided to build this because we noticed that embedding third-party apps and websites can be a nightmare due to incompatible platforms, security issues, and poor UX. Adding multiplayer functionality to these embeds makes this problem exponentially more difficult. On the backend, we’re spinning up a VM and running a resource-optimized fork of Chromium which we then stream to participants via WebRTC. Since we’re hosting the servers running the applications,…
2022 · threejs-example.hyperbeam.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Multiplayer▲124We built Multiplayer because we kept running into the same problem: coding agents connected to existing observability stacks inherit all the limitations those stacks were built with. Sampled traces, aggregated metrics, context that stops at service boundaries, missing request/response content from deep within the system. The PRs they produce look plausible and fail in production (i.e. “PR slop”). Multiplayer runs locally alongside Claude Code (Codex, Copilot, and Cursor coming soon) and captures full-stack, unsampled session data across your entire system. We collect everything from…
2025 · multiplayer.app · its alternatives →
- 11

- 12AT
I have some experience building these kinds of games, so last year I put together a beginner's guide on them. It's been getting more attention recently with people wanting to make/experiment with these games during quarantine, so I figured I'd share to get feedback: - Part 1, Client: https://victorzhou.com/blog/build-an-io-game-part-1/ - Part 2, Server: https://victorzhou.com/blog/build-an-io-game-part-2/ - [demo] An example .io game: https://example-io-game.victorzhou.com/
2020 · its alternatives →
- 13

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 →
- 14

Hi HN, I'm one of the engine programmers at All Out Games (https://allout.game/), a multiplayer-first gaming UGC platform where creators can make and play games with their friends. For scripting we wanted our creators to be able to jump in and create game mechanics without having to think about networking. If a developer had to manually send packets to/from client/server to get things to happen then we have failed. It is particularly bad if you are using AI tools because they struggle to keep in mind what code is meant to run where (client, server, or both) and…
Mar 2026 · docs.allout.game · its alternatives →
- 15AS
2013 · stuff.pyramidlabs.in · its alternatives →
- 16

SCTP is a low level protocol focused on reliable packet transmission. Unlike hopelessly flinging packets from one device to another, it makes sure that the packets are correct using CRC, removes duplicate packets, and allows for packets to be sent in any order. Going into an established library, I thought that everything was already implemented and that there wasn't anything to do until I went through the existing issues and organized all the tasks and decided on an order. Sean DuBois (https://github.com/Sean-Der), one of the co-creators and current maintainers of Pion, an…
2025 · pion.ly · its alternatives →
- 17MW
Link: http://xoxo.cm The idea here was to build a multiplayer game with the lowest possible barrier to entry to get started. That is, no registration, no game setup, as few steps as possible to actually start playing. There's not much substance here right now and there's still a few bugs that need to be hammered out. I'm also thinking of expanding on the idea with some other simple games down the road. Any feedback or suggestions on the concept in general would be much appreciated.
2011 · xoxo.cm · its alternatives →
- 18

TLDR: I made a community where you can find builders or product owners to collab on sideprojects together with <3 A year ago i completed my first sideproject, a digital course on how to "cold email a chief information security officer". I thought and think its a great course, but of course I fell into all the traps (didnt verify a need, i thought id make it and everyone would buy automatically), i tested google ads but hated nerding on that, so i decided to find a marketing person to partner up with! But i knew no one! That got me thinking how many people with relevant knowledge that isnt…
2025 · relentlessly.no · its alternatives →
- 19

A final project for Advanced Machine Learning. Build bots to play against this Tetris Sandbox! - mbrenman/TetrisPlayground
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
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 →
- 21

Hey HN, I’m the solo developer of Search to Play, a social bookmarking platform for gamers — kind of like Letterboxd or Goodreads, but for video games. You can log your games, track your backlog, write reviews, and follow others. I’m building this as an alternative to spreadsheet tracking or platform-locked tools (Steam, PSN, etc). Would love your feedback! Happy to answer any questions here.
2025 · searchtoplay.com · its alternatives →
- 22AF
Hi HN! I'm Nick, one of the cofounders of Bitping, and we'd like to share a tool that we've been working on for the past couple of years that lets you test network connectivity from real user devices around the world. We originally were part of a hackathon focused on building a product that is powered by micropayments and we settled on a network that could ping other network devices and users could be paid in fractions of a cent for performing said work. After winning the hackathon, we built an uptime monitoring service and discovered some discrepancies between our data and traditional…
2024 · developer.bitping.com · its alternatives →
- 23

- 24AM
Hi everyone! I'm one of the developers behind this project. I wrote it with my two brothers, Daniel and Ricardo. For years the three of us have been curious about how multiplayer games work, which is why we decided to work on this project. Our goal was to gain a deep understanding of how different players can share the same 3D space, which is why we wrote our own tiny game engine instead of using something like Unity. We wrote the engine using C++ and OpenGL, and we then compiled it to WebAssembly using Emscripten so that it would run effortlessly on web browsers. We are really excited about…
2022 · play.moonlightmuseum.io · 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 →