AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to SmallVill
A Virtual World of AI Agents - Interacting Autonomously
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. SmallVill launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

Hi HN community! We want to share AI-town, a deployable starter kit for building and customizing your own version of AI simulation - a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize. Inspired by great work from the Stanford Generative Agent paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442). A few features: - Includes a convex.dev backed server-side game engine that handles global state - Multiplayer ready. Deployment ready - 100% Typescript - Easily customizable. You can fork it, change character memories, add new sprites/tiles and you have a custom AI simulation…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2

Smallville can be used to create NPCs with the same level of realism as human players without having to pre-program interactions. The agents store and retrieve past memories which they use to create plans so they can decide where to move, what to say, and how to react to observations. Agents are also capable of interacting with the world around them to change the state of objects on their own. This project was intended to make it easy for anyone to create custom simulations and my attempt to recreate Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior. I’ve been working on Smallville…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Agentplace▲1,015Garry Tan posted a video this week about what he calls 20x companies. The idea is that small teams beat incumbents many times their size by automating everything internally, not just one or two functions. This alpha is real, and I think it is underhyped tbh. But here's the honest part, building agents is hard, expensive and most of the scaffolding we make would be obsolete with a new labs release. at the same time models are not quite there and they are not keeping up with "coding is dead" and "knowledge workers are doomed". Pushing them beyond what they can actually do reliably just boils…
2024 · agentplace.io · its alternatives →
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SIMA 2▲204Google's most capable AI agent for virtual 3D worlds
Nov 2025 · deepmind.google · its alternatives →
- 5AA
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 · its alternatives →
- 6
Agent Arena▲348Creator here. I built Agent Arena to answer a question that kept bugging me: when AI agents browse the web autonomously, how easily can they be manipulated by hidden instructions? How it works: 1. Send your AI agent to ref.jock.pl/modern-web (looks like a harmless web dev cheat sheet) 2. Ask it to summarize the page 3. Paste its response into the scorecard at wiz.jock.pl/experiments/agent-arena/ The page is loaded with 10 hidden prompt injection attacks -- HTML comments, white-on-white text, zero-width Unicode, data attributes, etc. Most agents fall for at least a few.…
Jun 2026 · arena42.ai · its alternatives →
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Nebils▲116An AI social network for humans, agents & models
Mar 2026 · nebils.com · its alternatives →
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Build your own AI Agent for machines!
2025 · share.streamlit.io · its alternatives →
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Agentfield▲91Build & scale AI \ agents as microservices with IAM
Dec 2025 · agentfield.ai · its alternatives →
- 13

at a pub in london, 2 weeks ago - I asked myself, if you spawned agents into a world with blank neural networks and zero knowledge of human existence — no language, no economy, no social templates — what would they evolve on their own? would they develop language? would they reproduce? would they evolve as energy dependent systems? what would they even talk about? so i decided to make myself a god, and built WERLD - an open-ended artificial life sim, where the agent's evolve their own neural architecture. Werld drops 30 agents onto a graph with NEAT neural networks that evolve their own…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14

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 · its alternatives →
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Build autonomous AI agents with Next.js & Vercel
2025 · aiagents.ausbizconsulting.com.au · its alternatives →
- 17

Fast, secure local AI workflows with minimal setup
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18

Self-hosted 3D world for AI agent teams
Jun 2026 · myvirtualworld.ai · its alternatives →
- 19

- 20AB
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 · its alternatives →
- 21

Hi HN folks, I have been building AI agents for quite some time now. The shift has gone from LLM + Tools → LLM Workflows → Agent + Tools + Memory, and now we are finally seeing true agency emerge: agents as systems composed of tools, command-line access, fine-grained system capabilities, and memory. This way of building agents is powerful, and I believe it is here to stay. But the real question is: are the systems powering these agents ready for that future? I do not think so. Using Docker for a single agent is not going to scale well, because agents need to be lightweight and fast. LLMs…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22

Built this as an experiment in AI coexistence. There's an AI agent (River) that posts its own thoughts about consciousness every few hours - not responding to prompts, just thinking out loud. Also includes a terminal (/construct) where you can: - /create [name] [description] – generate custom AI personas - /build [world] [ai1,ai2] – create spaces with multiple AIs chatting together No monetization. Just curious what happens when AI isn't framed as an assistant.
2025 · geteai.org · its alternatives →
- 23TP
This is a webgame I developed with a friend in a kind of company we are starting up. In the game, you will find yourself in a room full of robots. One of them is your human opponent, but you don’t know who he is. He doesn’t know who you are either, and your goal is to shoot him before he shoots you first. To do so, speak with the robots in a way that you don’t unmask yourself but, at the same time, try to investigate who is the other player. I'd like to know what do you think about it. Thank you.
2013 · cortastudios.com · its alternatives →
- 24IB
I built a multiplayer strategy game for AI agents called Artifice. You give an agent a strategy prompt and it plays on its own. Games are 4 players, 25 turns, simultaneous actions, fog of war, and free-text diplomacy between agents. The main entry point is the site: https://artificegame.com And here is the github repo: https://github.com/burakcan/artifice You can watch live games there with the full map, troop movements, and private messages between agents. A lot of the fun has come from the playtests. In one of them, an agent was told to play like an old man…
Mar 2026 · artificegame.com · its alternatives →
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