Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Our startup Construct 2, how far we've come and lessons learnt so far
We did a "Show HN post" 6 months back of our startup and we're very excited to show everyone how far we've come as well as the lessons we've learnt so far! It's been a roller-coaster so far and we think there's lot more of the same to come! We did apply for Ycombinator funding but got turned down :( But may re-apply soon :) For those that don't know, our startup is called Scirra and we make Construct 2 which is an HTML5 game engine (http://www.scirra.com). Our engine allows anyone to make HTML5 games without knowing any programming. It's only me and my brother working on this and we're based…
Construct 2 is an HTML5 game engine that enables users to create games without programming knowledge. Developed by Scirra, a two-person startup based in London, the engine features a visual development environment… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Our startup Construct 2, how far we've come and lessons learnt so far launched in 2012; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1AF
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 →
- 2IS
2012 · ektomarch.com · its alternatives →
- 3
21st.dev▲1,211I originally built this app to organize and reuse interesting React + Tailwind components I came across on Twitter, inspired by the shadcn/ui approach. Later, a friend started contributing their own components, and it got me thinking—this could grow into something bigger, like an NPM for design engineers to share and use components. Would love to hear your thoughts!
2025 · 21st.dev · its alternatives →
- 4IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 5IT
2019 · s-poony.github.io · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7
Context.dev▲814Hello, My name is Yahia, I've been working on scraping products for a long time and maintain a couple of free sites in my spare time (E.g. knifegeek.io) What prompted this is i've rebuilt scraping infra at every company I've started and finally just made it a product. Pass a URL, get clean markdown, html, images, sitemap or pass a domain, get logos, colors, socials, industry data. Goal is to offer a better service than VC funded competitors at a fraction of the cost. Stealth is included and automatic at no additional cost (normally an upcharge by alternatives). Would love your honest thoughts.
Jul 2026 · context.dev · its alternatives →
- 89D
2025 · 90s.dev · its alternatives →
- 9
Create a beautiful, responsive website in under an 1 hour
2017 · designmodo.com · its alternatives →
- 10
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 · its alternatives →
- 11MA
hi all, I've always wanted to make my own game, but couldn't afford a thousand-dollar adobe (flash+photoshop) license. I'm not a talented programmer, have no degree in CS. But I understand some elements of design. So I got me a copy of ImpactJS, and after about 5 months of steep learning curve (at least for me), I managed to come up with a game. I also integrated it with a highscore and badge system, similar to what you get at Kongregate. You need to login with Google/OpenID to earn badges/scores. link is: http://www.hotbazooka.com/privatejoe hope to hear some feedback/questions from you guys!
2011 · hotbazooka.com · its alternatives →
- 12MO
Hey Everybody! Hope you had a merry christmas Today I had a bit of fun with Claude. Started by scraping YC's startups list, then ran them through OpenAI's embedding service, then UMAP'd the embedding to reduce the dimension to just two coordinates and then just forced Claude to write React that would compile to visualize that. I had fun and I think it's interesting, so take a look! Also note that you won't be able to zoom on mobile (found about this Plotly limitation way too late). If there's interest I can fix this issue by changing plotting libs tomorrow :) Merry christmas
2024 · yc-map.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 13MF
2012 · taketheblock.com · its alternatives →
- 14
A top-down 2d game engine, written from scratch in under 1000 lines of C. Development of the game based on this engine is streamed on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ryanpcmcquen - ryanpcmcquen/basque
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
An demo app for lattice-core. Contribute to jasonl99/card_game development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
- 17MT
inspired by Startup School 2011 Link: http://chrome.private-joe.com
2011 · chrome.private-joe.com · its alternatives →
- 18WR
Hello HN!<p>We're running our own online course on how to make your own HTML5 computer games. We'd love to invite you to participate! http://ureddit.com/class/76284/making-games-with-construct2<p>We think learning to make your own computer games is a great introduction to programming.
2013 · ureddit.com · its alternatives →
- 19RA
I wanted to have a framework that would let me build web apps faster than ever before. I didn’t care if it was a little hacky or didn’t use best practices — I wanted to be able to get a multi-user application out the door in hours instead of months. I researched the CMS space for months before deciding to build something from scratch. My goal was to be 90% done building a web app once I had the static HTML and CSS finished. I’m not a big fan of building out API endpoints over and over again for every new app, fiddling with a database, or doing lots of config. What I ended up with was a…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 20SF
Hi HN! I’ve been building a 2D game using a custom engine I wrote from scratch – no Unity, no frameworks. It’s fully self-funded and will be released commercially on Steam. Engine source code (MIT): http://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo I’d love feedback on the gameplay, visuals, performance, or anything else. Thanks!
2025 · bereprobate.com · its alternatives →
- 21
FoundersWall▲35I used to be just a blogger. Now I build internet products, still without code, using AI, design, and taste. I was building in public on X for last 2 months. And honestly, I got tired of how it became performative and started to feel fake. I shipped 2 products. Both failed to get any real traction. I kept sneaking into popular builders’ profiles, hoping to learn how they do it. One thing I kept seeing everywhere, product launch directories. I thought here is the scope. So I started building one. Same UI like the rest. Nothing special. Suddenly one day when it was half built, I realized…
2025 · founderswall.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Davia▲56Hi HN, We’re Afnan, Theo and Ruben. We’re all ML engineers or data scientists, and we kept running into the same thing: we’d write useful Python functions, either for ourselves or internal tools, and then hit a wall when we wanted to share them as actual apps. We tried Streamlit and Gradio. They’re great to get something up quickly. But as soon as we needed more flexibility or something more polished, there wasn’t really a path forward. Rebuilding the frontend properly in React isn’t where we bring the most value. So we started building Davia. You keep your code in Python, decorate the…
2025 · davia.ai · its alternatives →
- 23AM
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 →
- 24
Hi HN, Yesterday I live streamed myself for 6 hours building this from scratch. It’s an AI agent that uses Llama 2 (so far the 13b chat model) to generate a full react codebase from a single prompt. It had a “dev loop” that iterates on your feedback and resolves dependencies. In the end it kinda worked and I got excited so wanted to post here haha. Long story short a viewer on my discord suggested I build in of these and I just had to look into how these work (inspired by GPT Engineer and AutoGPT) I wanted to work on a more specific downstream task so I focused on web dev. Llama 2 isn’t the…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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