Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)
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…
This platform enables developers to build multiplayer games using only Lua scripts, with all rendering and logic handled server-side rather than requiring client-side code. Games stream game primitives instead of… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1IB
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 →
- 2
A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
I've been building a modern Ultima Online server emulator from scratch. It's not feature-complete (no combat, no skills yet), but the foundation is solid and I wanted to share it early. What it does today: - Full packet layer for the classic UO client (login, movement, items, mobiles) - Lua scripting for item behaviors (double-click a potion, open a door — all defined in Lua, no C# recompile) - Spatial world partitioned into sectors with delta sync (only sends packets for new sectors when crossing boundaries) - Snapshot-based persistence with MessagePack - Source generators for automatic DI…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 5
So just for fun, I wrote a complete multiplayer game in pure C++. I even wrote my own texture atlas packer, which is now used by Assassin's Creed, 2 scientific publications as well as a drone manufacturing company - each of these basically mentions the name of my game. There is even a claim that Unity patented some of the ECS ideas that originate from this project. See https://github.com/TeamHypersomnia/Hypersomnia#tech-highligh... for details. By the way the game is pretty darn good. 10 people connected yesterday to test a new map:…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
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 →
- 7
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 →
- 8
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 · 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 →
- 10AC
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 →
- 11
Some time ago, I was implementing saves for my LOVE2D game. I wanted to do a full dump of the game state -- which included closures (AI), complex graphs, sets with tables as keys and also fundamentally non-serializable data (coroutines and userdata), that require user-defined serialization/deserialization logic. I went through every Lua serialization library -- none covered all data types/cases. So I wrote my own. It is a polished version, thoroughly annotated, tested and documented. It is made to be as functional and customizable as possible (or at least I did everything I could…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
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 →
- 13HM
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 →
- 14AO
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 · its alternatives →
- 15
An open source Lua framework for building 3D games and VR experiences.
2017 · lovr.org · its alternatives →
- 16IM
Hi, I've been developing an HTML5 MMORPG game where people can submit code to play a game, like collect items, destroy defense towers or kill monsters, etc.. I've been working on this for over 1.5 yrs (all my spare time) and now it's ready for preview, does anyone want to try it out? It's mostly opensource (and the rest will be opensource sooner or later) Please access it with PC, it's an HTML5 game: https://bytelegend.com/ I really want it to expand to more languages, but right now I've only finished Java part. I wonder if anyone can help me with other languages. Besides, I'm…
2022 · bytelegend.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hey HN, this is a small project myself and closer friends have been building on our free time (https://github.com/Dr-Nekoma/lyceum), it finally reached 0.1.0, we are open to feedback! The original idea was to experiment with Zig + Raylib, eventually we wrote a small server in Erlang as well. We started by first interacting with Erlang via its C bindings, but this eventually led to some of us to prototyping our own tooling to better integrate Zig types with Erlang, we called such tool "zerl" as its avaliable here…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
For the past 3 years, I've been creating a new 2D game programming language where the multiplayer is completely automatic. The idea is that someone who doesn't even know what a "remote procedure call" is can make a multiplayer game by just setting `maxHumanPlayers=5` and it "just works". The trick is the whole game simulation, including all the concurrent threads, can be executed deterministically and snapshotted for rollback netcode. Normally when coding multiplayer you have to worry about following "the rules of multiplayer" like avoiding non-determinism, or not modifying entities your…
2025 · easel.games · its alternatives →
- 19
This is a two man team and we're in full-on development of a new platform to assist in multiplayer games. We're looking to launch in about a month or two with an OpenID server accessible to customers (or they can use provider like Facebook/Twitter) and a couple cool multiplayer features. After we launch development will continue until we have a well-rounded API. We're primarily targeting HTML5+JS developers but the system will work with any language that can make RESTful API calls. We know there's some stiff competition out there but we're looking for feedback and what features may make…
2014 · playpi.net · its alternatives →
- 20SM
2017 · juanpabloaj.com · its alternatives →
- 21
I got my start on the Internet in the very early 90s playing with, authoring in, and programming on LambdaMOO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO) and similar systems. Shared virtual social spaces, with a persistent object oriented authoring / scripting language. They can be classified as MUDs (depending on who you talk to) but the focus is social, creative / authoring, and shared programming not RPG gaming. I've always wanted to see this kind of thing modernized and further developed. Over the last 25 years or so I've worked on similar but novel & improved…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22MP
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 →
- 23
A minimal text-editor with lua scripting. Contribute to skx/kilua development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi all, I’ve been working on this project for a while but haven't shared it properly on Hacker News. It is a casual gaming platform focused on simple multiplayer games that can be played in person with a central screen (like a TV) or remotely via video chat. You can also play on your smart Android based TVs via the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gametje (it was just released recently so could be buggy). It is also available directly in Discord: https://discord.com/discovery/applications/12153230008666071... as an…
Nov 2025 · gametje.com · 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 →