Alternatives
Products that do what Skyline Co-op is like SimTower, but built around democratic socialism does
I've been rebuilding old games with Claude. While creating a modern take on SimTower and having election news on TV in the background, I had the idea to build the economy of the game around democratic socialism instead of capitalism. Instead of a real estate tycoon, you are an elected steward of the building, held responsible by the Assembly. Homes are allocated off a waitlist, dues are set on a sliding scale, and you face outside pressures from neighboring capitalist landlords. The crown jewel is attracting a large grant to establish an observatory at the top of your tower, attracting…
- 1IG
I was at FB/Meta from late 2013 to early 2023, mostly working in the compiler/runtime spaces. I got hit in the spring 2023 layoff wave. I immediately started making games in my newfound free time (a lifelong interest, and I even worked in AA(A?) back ca. ~2000), and in October 2023 I stumbled upon the idea of a roguelike pachinko/plinko game inspired by Luck Be A Landlord. Things snowballed quickly, I started talking to publishers, then worked like crazy through all of 2024, almost the hardest I've ever worked in my career, and launched the game in December 2024. It's sold…
2025
- 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
- 3AA
This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API. The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site. LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which…
Feb 2026 · hallucinatingsplines.com
- 4MS
This is a little game implemented over a week of tinkering and targeting Emacs. The point is both to have fun with this kind of simulations, and also explore the "functional core / imperative shell" approach to architecture. I also developed a tile and tile effect definition DSL, which makes this even easier to extend. From this point of view it's a success: easy testing, easy extension, Gameplay-wise the simulation is too simplistic, and needs input from people interested in this kind of toys. The original Micropolis/SimSity is the last time I built a virtual city.
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 5MA
It all started as an experiment to see if I could build a game making heavy use of Deno and its SQLite driver. After sharing an early build in the „What are you working on?“ thread here, I got the encouragement I needed to polish it and make a version 1.0 for Steam. So here it is, Microlandia, a SimCity Classic-inspired game with parameters from real-life datasets, statistics and research. It also introduces aspects that are conveniently hidden in other games (like homelessness), and my plan is to continue updating, expanding and perfecting the models for an indefinite amount of time.
Dec 2025 · microlandia.city
- 6IM
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
- 7IA
I'm a software developer with 20+ years of experience but during this time I never programmed any games, but I really wanted to for the longest time. With the advent of AI coding agents I thought that this is the best time to try and so I've learned a bit of Phaser.js (a Javascript based game engine) and entered Beginner's Jam Summer 2025 - a game jam for beginners in the game dev industry that allows AI coding. After around 25-30 hours (working mainly after my full-time day job) I managed to submit the game I called "Tower of Time" (the theme of the jam was "Time Travel"). You can play it…
2025 · github.com
- 8IC
I built a desktop Mars colony survival game called Underhill, in homage to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Land on Mars, build solar panels and greenhouses, and try not to pass out during dust storms. Eventually your colonists split into factions: Greens who want to terraform and Reds who want to preserve Mars. There’s Chill Mode for players that just want to build & hang, and Conflict Mode that introduces the Red v. Green factions. Reds sabotage, the terrain slowly turns green as the world gets more terraformed. Feedback welcome, especially on performance and gameplay!
Feb 2026 · underhillgame.com
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- 10AS
I built this with Claude cause I always wanted to tinker with a simulation economoy and I love space themes. A space-economy sim where nothing is scripted. A few hundred autonomous ships each run their own planner. Some chase the best trade route, take a delivery contract, refuel, retrofit at a shipyard, or dock so the crew can rest before morale tanks. Markets price everything off supply with shortage-urgency multipliers, factions tax and subsidize, populations migrate when they're unhappy, and stations that go broke get abandoned and rot. It started as an Elixir/Phoenix prototype, but…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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- 12AD
This is something that I've been working on on-and-off in my spare time for the last few years. I started in 2020 during Covid trying to do a Mount and Blade style map in UE4, and it grew from there until where it is now - I would just add a feature, then another, until it came together. Since the start of the year I've really been trying to polish it some more. I've got the full thing planned for a Q3 25 release. Github release if you don't have Steam: https://github.com/joe-gibbs/fall-of-an-empire-release
2024 · store.steampowered.com
- 13
- 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
- 15
- 16
- 17IB
I am a solo developer, and I built Core MBA because I was frustrated with the "video course" default in business education. I wanted to build a "compiler for business logic"—a tool where I could read a concept in 5 minutes and immediately test it in a hostile environment to see if my strategy actually compiles or throws a runtime error. The project is a business simulator built on React 19 and TypeScript. The core technical innovation isn't just using AI; it's the architecture of a closed loop between a deterministic economic engine and a generative AI validation layer. The biggest technical…
Jan 2026 · core-mba.pro
- 18AN
I was just digging through some old projects to find a link for a potential new employer and stumbled upon this reminder of how much I enjoyed middle-management office politics.
2023 · rafsters.itch.io
- 19IB
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
- 20OC
Hi Hacker News! My Co Co-op Matt and I are on a work term and were given the task of building a webapp that could make $20 in four weeks as our onboarding challenge. We're in the final stretch here and would sure appreciate HN's thoughts (we realize we kind of did this backwards, building something first before talking to people who might use it, but hey! We're leaning.). So basically, we tried to apply game dynamics to retaining visitors to websites by offering a reward (ie. discount coupon / premium content, etc.) for meeting various 'objectives' (ie. pages to visit). We call it ScavSite…
2011
- 21AB
Hi HN, Can current AI systems actually run a business? There’s a growing belief that LLM agents can already manage entire teams, replace the entire software stack or even act as an AI CEO. So we built a controlled, measurable environment to evaluate this premise. Why did we build this benchmark? A modern enterprise operates in a dynamic environment with high uncertainty and incomplete information. The CEO has to deal with delayed consequences, staffing/resource tradeoffs and death by a thousand cuts of failure modes. If we ever want AI systems that can meaningfully make operational or…
Nov 2025
- 22SC
I was tired of games like Mafia Wars and wanted a phone-based MMO Strategy game where hundreds of players could actually engage each other on a 2D map, so I made one. I track the state of the game each night so we can display a visual timeline of territory controlled by each alliance. (example: http://bit.ly/q5CFhU) I use jQuery mobile for the front end so it runs on most phones (via Phonegap) as well as modern web browsers. The server side is handled by Java Servlets and MySQL. This started as a hobby - I'm not a developer by training - so I am very interested in feedback, suggestions, and…
2011
- 23MR
We have launched our startup: MMO strategy game that can be played in your browser. Not very unique from first sound, but the fun hides in the gameplay which tries to blend RTS and web strategy genres. Feedback on the site design and game impressions are very welcome! Some of game features include: * Powerful trading system that allows people to exchange in-game currency (creds) for game resources. * Real-time real-world based movement system that allows players to interact while travelling, making our game akin to classic RTS genre. This also allows interesting gameplay possibilities like…
2012
- 24
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