Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Self-Funded Game with Homemade Engine – Play Online, Steam Coming
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!
A 2D game built on a custom engine created entirely from scratch without Unity or other frameworks. The developer self-funded the project and plans to release it commercially on Steam. The engine's source code is… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1GD
2025 · reprobate.site · its alternatives →
- 2MM
Fun free no-download game you
2021 · vnav.io · its alternatives →
- 3AF
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 →
- 4
An OpenGL RTS game engine written in C. Contribute to eduard-permyakov/permafrost-engine development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
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 →
- 6
Homebrew engine https://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
I'm making a platform for simple open source games you can play anywhere. Games are all just JavaScript classes and you can read the source of every game on the platform. I started working on initial "games" (mostly rendering tests) in 2018 and eventually built all of the platform stuff around it to make it easy to share games. There's also an in-browser editor available for you to make and publish games all from the browser. Would love some feedback on the games and studio features as well as the platform overall. All of the code is available at https://github.com/homegamesio
Jul 2026 · homegames.io · its alternatives →
- 8TF
I always enjoy reading posts about indie game development and looking at the source code of games other people have built. So for any game I release I naturally I want to do the same. https://github.com/Mknsri/HockeySlam Hockey Slam is a hockey shootout game on Android which I built almost from scratch. Some of the engine features include 3D graphics with PBR materials, a rudimentary physics system, replays, a multithreaded job system and a hot-reload DLL platform for developing on Windows. I detailed the creation of the game in it's own post, but now that time has passed…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 9CP
Hi HN! 2d spritesheets for game development are often distributed as a PNG image, sometimes with a separate JSON or XML metadata document describing the layout, including any animation sequences within the sheet. Sometimes there is no metadata document and you have to work it out and manually write custom code to chop up the spritesheet and reference the sprites you want. I think it would be good if it became standard practice to distribute spritesheet PNGs with the metadata inline inside a PNG "chunk" so the whole thing is self-contained. That way artists can just distribute one file, and…
2019 · mccormick.cx · its alternatives →
- 10UL
In the wake of all the Unity nonsense, just wanted to toss the Raverie engine into this mix :) We’re building off a previous engine that we worked on for DigiPen Institute of Technology called the Zero Engine with a similar component based design architecture to Unity. Our engine had a unique feature called Spaces: separate worlds/levels that you can instantiate and run at the same time, which became super useful for creating UI overlays using only game objects, running multiple simulations, etc. The lighting and rendering engine is scriptable, and the default deferred rendering…
2023 · raverie-us.github.io · its alternatives →
- 11
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 →
- 12
I've been working on Athena Crisis for about two years, and full time for the past 9 months. The game is entirely built from scratch using React and CSS without a game engine. It runs anywhere, including the Steam Deck. You can even use a gamepad on the landing page to play! Previously the landing page had a video of the game but my goal was to always just put the actual game on the website. I merged the landing page into the game's monorepo, added the game's React components, and boom – the video was replaced with a playable version of Athena Crisis. Of course, the real game has tons more…
2024 · athenacrisis.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Hello HN, Just wanted to show this little 2D game engine that I've been working on for some time (around 2 years on the editor part, longer on some of the components). It's quite full featured but obviously this a project of such magnitude already that the work never really ends. That being said it's definitely already at a point where games can made and published. The editor runs natively on Windows and Linux using Qt5. The games can run on both Win and Linux as well as on WASM with WebGL. Feature wise there's a bunch of the stuff you'd expect. Audio, graphics, scripting,…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
I open sourced my HTML5 multiplayer 3D voxel browser game engine.
2023 · kevzettler.com · its alternatives →
- 15IB
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 · its alternatives →
- 16
GitHub repo: https://github.com/ArcadeMakerSources/ArcadeMaker (first of all, i want to say that I made this project for fun and challenge. I always wanted to create my own language. This has no business goal or something.) So the project is a 2D game engine (MonoGame backend) inspired by GameMaker 8. It includes its own IDE (built with WinForms) and an interpreted programming language that I wrote myself. The language—definitely the biggest challenge in the project—is a simple dynamically typed language. When I started, I had zero knowledge of how to build something like…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
It took me 20 months to develop it in my spare time. I used Unity game engine, I did not have any game dev experience before. It was more complex that I thought at the begining, I spent lots of time on promotion, marketing, founding company, learning about the legal aspects of different parts, for example music. Some parts were easier than I expected. Unity makes it very easy to build for all three operating systems (Win, MacOs, Linux), I am not sure why more game devs are not using this possibility. I also like working on Steam as distribution system. It is not exactly easy for a newcomer,…
2022 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →
- 18
I've spent 30 years making games as both a hobby and profession, working with Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, RPG Maker, Ren'Py, Godot, and many others. A few years ago, I attended a game dev meetup and met dozens of people with incredible passion for making games – but they were struggling because they lacked technical knowledge. That's when I decided to build a tool that anyone could use to create games. I started developing this as a side project, eventually raised ~$100K through crowdfunding in Korea, then secured ~$200K in angel investment. I assembled a team, and we've been building this…
2025 · play-maker.io · its alternatives →
- 19IJ
2011 · codebrief.com · its alternatives →
- 20
A 3D game rendered entirely in CSS/HTML. Relying as much as possible on traditional html/css features instead of modern graphic APIs. Supports lighting, shadows, culling, etc. Can you escape the dungeon?
2020 · pantel.is · its alternatives →
- 21MP
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 · its alternatives →
- 22H0
Hello, Hacker News! My name is Lillian (see: http://about.lillian.link/), and I just released version 0.2 of my MIT-licensed game engine, Hypatia(http://lillian-lemmer.github.io/hypatia/). Hypatia is a game engine for single player 2D action adventure games. You can use it to make a game like Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Hypatia is aimed at non-programmers and programmers alike. I'm seeking any sort of feedback. Hypatia supports FreeBSD first, but has great support for just about any platform…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 23MA
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 →
- 24
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