Alternatives
Products that do what Play Solhopper – A Minimalist Game In ~500 Lines of HTML/CSS/JS does
Hi HN! I'm excited to share SOLHOPPER, a minimalist game I'm building in just ~500 lines of HTML/CSS/JS. Here's a breakdown of the development process and some fun quirks of the game: Challenges and Fun Facts: - World Building & Math: Crafting the initial world and refining the game mechanics to keep it simple and compact was the toughest part. The back story is that you play as a Solhopper captain traveling away from earth at 10% the speed of light to capture solar flairs which unlock endowments (bottom left) to develop that star system. These endowments were setup by benefactors…
- 1IM
I had the concept in my head for some time and firstly just prototyped it using only HTML & CSS. Sent it to a few friends and they liked it so I made it into its own website and added few 'competitive' features like click counter and share button.
2022 · rotaboxes.com
- 2MA
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
- 3IS
Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I've just reached beta in my game BoxByte Lyte. -What is it- It's a free 3d arcade game for hardcore players that uses color matching in interesting ways. Also it's a one button game, well movement and one button. Cool huh? The final release will be free too. -What I need- This is a very challenging game, so I really need to balance the difficulty so that it's still hard but not impossible. It would be great just to hear your experiences of the game and how far in it you got. -Where can I report bugs?-…
2015
- 4IB
I got pretty good at (and very addicted to) the lunar lander game from a few days ago... so I decided to make an autopilot for the lander based on what I felt like was the best strategy! Now I can have perfect landings every time without lifting a finger :D Writing the autopilot code was a lot more fun than I expected! It felt a bit like programming a robot. Source code: https://github.com/szhu/lunar-lander-autopilot Original lander HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35032506
2023 · szhu.github.io
- 5IC
Hello everyone! I created a short game in just a few days, just for fun, where you play as an ant and feed it apples This game also features random landscape generation, with clouds and trees arranged in a chaotic pattern across all coordinates. This is what took me the longest time :) I would appreciate your feedback ^ ^
Sep 2025 · aanthonymax.github.io
- 6AG
Hello guys, I'm glad to present to you PlayAlgoShip, a web-based game where you solve fun algorithmic puzzles. The rules are simple, you need to find the correct algorithm that makes the ship collect all stars. If you succeed, you will unlock the next level! There are also live statistics like how many players are currently playing on your current level (you are not alone struggling!), the finish rate of the level, and how many players liked/disliked it. It's 100% free, I hope you will enjoy the experience!
2024 · playalgoship.com
- 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
- 8IB
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
- 9AS
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
- 10AA
I built this over the holiday break with my two girls (ages 6 and 8). You pilot a UFO and beam up humans, cows, cats, dogs, and sheep for points. They drew all the art while I talked to Claude Code to scaffold the game logic. The magic moment was watching my kids use voice dictation to talk directly to Claude Code. My 8-year-old asked for a "purpler" tractor beam and watched it change in real time. She wasn’t coding, but she _was_ driving: describing what she wanted, testing the result, and iterating fast. It was really cool to watch... later on she asked me what javascript was and we dug…
Jan 2026 · studio.mfelix.org
- 11AQ
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
- 12WG
Hi HN! This has been a fun little side project. You simply click to shoot arrows at falling circles (and the arrows of other players!) Hopefully, I make other social & simple games over time. I had to struggle with all the usually problems of game synchronization. It was a fun way to explore phoenix & elixir. You'll notice the signature claude code purple gradient. I'll be honest, I couldn't have built it without AI! If you really like it you can vote with your wallet and toss me $1.99. Or not!!
Dec 2025 · wingspan.games
- 13AH
My wife and I recently submitted to a mobile game jam on Newgrounds (yes, it's still around). What started as a question of whether we could do it somehow morphed into whether we could do without so many of the seemingly needless complications rampant in our respective industries. My wife thus did all the art as traditional frame-by-frame animation (no puppets or tweening) and I preceded without a game engine. I did use a pre-processor that gives JS a Lisp syntax (Parenscript), because C-syntax is gross. We hope the end result, while definitely of small scope, will serve to inspire some…
2022 · github.com
- 14PS
2019 · ask5.github.io
- 15

Hey HN, I built Bisecto (https://bisecto.com), a minimalist browser game with one simple mechanic, cutting (bisecting) a procedural 2D shape into two exact 50/50 halves with a single straight line. Confession: I got completely hooked watching those viral reels of people trying to cut fruits and vegetables into perfectly equal halves, and that was my inspiration for this game :D I've been writing code for 12+ years, but for this project I leaned heavily on LLMs to quickly spin up this game, I thought it's going to be quick, but it took me some time (around 2 weeks) to make the…
17d ago · bisecto.com
- 16MW
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
- 17MF
I know everyone is a bit burned out on blockchain and cryptocurrency related stuff around these parts, but I've been working on as a side project for the last few months and thought you guys might be interested: https://cryptoempire.io/ It's still a bit buggy and incomplete (the mobile ux needs a lot of work, the leaderboard isn't functional yet, etc.), but I've reached a point where I'm not totally ashamed of sharing it :) Any feedback would be most welcome!
2018
- 18AS
I didn't realize Universe Sandbox ran on MacOS, and I was in the mood to play around a bit. Some functions it's got: - Random system generation - Sonification is super fun too - Habitability Simulation (Just for fun, don't cite this please) - Replacing, spawning, deleting objects I've had tons of fun building this, so I hope someone else can share the joy. It's free and runs in the browser. I'd love to hear any feedback. I think this is at a state where I might leave it as it is, but if people are interested in other features, maybe I'll keep working on it. I've kept saying I'll stop working…
Dec 2025 · luna.watermelonson.com
- 19IB
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
- 20AR
A minimal "@ moving around a hardcoded map" implemented in a bunch of languages, some by me and some contributed by others. A slightly more interesting riff on the Hello World or 99 Bottles of Beer theme. More languages or improvements on existing ones would be nice :) There's a github repo at: https://github.com/nrkn/SimpleRL
2011
- 21IM
Thank you https://opengameart.org for your service. People like me who can't draw or compose music are in your debt. The game, "Glitch and Rush" has been made in a few hours here and there. I've been tinkering in GameDev for years, if not decades, but I never released anything. The goal here was simple: - come up with a core mechanic - implement a single level - add some polishing - RELEASE I hope you'll enjoy it. BTW, my best time is 2min23s (yes, I'm bad at my own game, it's ok, I'm ok).
2022 · linkdd.itch.io
- 22IM
Hey there HN, I took a page from Wordle's mechanisms and made this game for fun for some friends and I. Check out Wheredle and let me know what you think of it! ↙ ↗ ↘ https://wheredle.xyz
2022 · wheredle.xyz
- 23CM
I recently started to learn code and created this game with next.js. please let me know your thoughts
2024 · spendelonmuskmoney.org
- 24GA
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
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →