Alternatives
Products that do what Teaching a Dinosaur to Jump: Rust, WebAssembly, and Neural Evolution does
What began as a lightweight programming experiment quickly transformed into a deeply engaging technical exploration into the realms of neuroevolution, game physics, and browser-based simulation. My original goal was modest: replicate the "Chrome Dino" game using a performant and modern web stack. However, the project evolved far beyond expectations. The twist? I wanted the dinosaur to teach itself to jump.
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In 2024 Google Labs released GenDino: a version of the Chrome Dinosaur Game that let users turn prompts into skins. GenDino is dead. The Dino Game happens to be OS, so I forked it and created Vibedino to let your prompts change the actual game. Make the dino front-flip every time it jumps. Add a hard mode after 1000m. Break my backend by implementing the full PageRank algorithm. Give it the dumbest feature idea you can think of and then approve it yourself to deploy to the main site!
Jul 2026 · vibedino.com
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2015 · otoro.net
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2020 · github.com
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I’ve been working on a browser-based evolutionary simulation as a personal experiment. Organisms adapt to environmental pressure over time, and there are no explicit goals or scoring, the system is open-ended and runs continuously. I built this mainly to challenge myself and to explore how to surface simulation behavior and statistics in a way that stays readable rather than overwhelming. As a side effect, it’s also something my kids enjoys watching run. Curious what resonates and what doesn’t, and happy to answer questions about the design or tradeoffs.
Jan 2026 · soupof.life
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We made this for our school project. I think we went a little too ambitious.
2023 · github.com
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2015 · otoro.net
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I hereby present my little tiny pet project that entertained me for the past six months. In this post, I briefly present Maginet and its technical components. It is a turn-based strategy game that is built using Rust and compiles to WebAssembly with HTML5 bindings, which works on mobile and desktop alike! It comes with many game mechanics and components, including an AI opponent and online cross-platform multiplayer. There is so much to discuss even for a project of a smaller scale, but I am nevertheless excited to share a little bit about how you can actually build a game in Rust,…
2023 · evrim.zone
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I’ve spent the last few days prototyping a browser-based game engine stack designed for instant-load, "Roblox-for-Teens" style deployment. The goal is to lower the floor for AA indie devs who want high-fidelity physics and instant web distribution without the overhead of Unity or a heavy Godot export. The Stack Engine: A headless WASM/WebGPU implementation. I’m currently using custom flags and selective streaming to bypass standard browser memory and execution limits. Physics: I’ve ported Jolt (Guerrilla Games) but modified the solver to mimic the original Blam! engine (Bungie/Halo…
Jan 2026
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This was my recent weekend project, aimed at teaching me JavaScript, a bit of HTML5, and (mostly) WebGL. The orbital data are from NASA JPL. I was inspired in part by this Flash app: http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/orrery_2011_bce.swf, but wanted to do something in 3D. Coming from the games-dev world, this is my first introduction to web coding. The UI is jquery. I mostly used http://learningwebgl.com/blog for the 3D stuff. Being WebGL, it will work mostly on Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta. Forget about IE. I needed to figure out how to render text to the WebGL canvas - I…
2011 · solar-system-explorer.com
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Hi everyone! I'm one of the developers behind this project. I wrote it with my two brothers, Daniel and Ricardo. For years the three of us have been curious about how multiplayer games work, which is why we decided to work on this project. Our goal was to gain a deep understanding of how different players can share the same 3D space, which is why we wrote our own tiny game engine instead of using something like Unity. We wrote the engine using C++ and OpenGL, and we then compiled it to WebAssembly using Emscripten so that it would run effortlessly on web browsers. We are really excited about…
2022 · play.moonlightmuseum.io
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Jul 2026 · shankhan3.gumroad.com
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i built a small site to collect memories of the things we grew up with: floppy drives, Game Boys, cassette tapes, forgotten software, classic games. the tech stack is React, Supabase and Vercel. fair warning: the items on there right now were seeded by AI to get things started. the goal is for it to grow through community submission. there's a submit form, no account needed. i'd love to gather some early feedback and get some more ideas. something i was thinking about in the future is having users create accounts to favorite items and comment their own personal experiences with items. right…
Mar 2026 · fossilware.tech
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We did a "Show HN post" 6 months back of our startup and we're very excited to show everyone how far we've come as well as the lessons we've learnt so far! It's been a roller-coaster so far and we think there's lot more of the same to come! We did apply for Ycombinator funding but got turned down :( But may re-apply soon :) For those that don't know, our startup is called Scirra and we make Construct 2 which is an HTML5 game engine (http://www.scirra.com). Our engine allows anyone to make HTML5 games without knowing any programming. It's only me and my brother working on this and we're based…
2012
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I spent the past week implementing a 1 Layer Neural Net and training it on MNIST within the visual scripting language provided by scratch.mit.edu. It was tedious, but ultimately not too difficult. The code runs incredibly slowly, so much so that 64 samples of MNIST takes 5+ hours to train on my machine. There were a lot of little mini challenges that were fun to overcome (implementing softmax was very tricky). If you're interested, I encourage you to try and improve on it! More details in the linked blog post.
2024 · bell-boy.github.io
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Hey there! I'm Sami. Over the past year, I've been busy building apps for clients, and I always found it challenging to discover a great animated component library. So, I took it upon myself to learn how to create beautiful animations. It was tough at first, but with persistence and a lot of practice, I eventually started crafting some really impressive animations for my clients! Now, I'm excited to share some of my favorite creations with you on my platform, DynaUI. I'd love to hear what you think!
2024 · dynaui.design
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Hi HN, I built Weft over the last two weeks of Christmas break. I was teaching my kids Python and noticed the lack of interactivity in some of their learning experiences. The feedback loop was too long. I wanted to provide them with an experience similar to Bret Victor's concepts on Learnable Programming; i.e. an easier way to learn is to see immediately the reaction to your actions. Hence the reactivity ;) It is currently in early alpha and I’m planning to open-source the repo under AGPLv3 soon once I clean up the prototype code. I wrote up a short blog post with more details on the "Why"…
Jan 2026 · play.weft.sh
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2022 · us-evolution-simulator.andrew.gr
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2021 · webassembly.cloud
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2014 · windowsphone.com
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