Alternatives
Products that do what Those Who Die as Cattle does
What if a game gave you the backstory of everyone you killed or got killed? I feel like I've heard this question asked before, but I've never seen it done. For Ludum Dare 56 (a game jam), I spent 48 hours building a prototype called Those Who Die As Cattle, a WW1 trench warfare simulation game. I used ChatGPT 4o-mini to generate details for the 12,000 soldiers involved in the game. Notably, I had to supply names because it couldn't introduce sufficient variety. I also had to add randomly generated adjectives for the soldiers; otherwise, the prompts were too similar, even with different seeds…
- 1MA
A few months ago (82 days to be exact!) I posted a link on HN to my game, Meatshields. A bunch of you commented and played my game and gave me some wonderful feedback. Over the last few months I've been playing with many of you and implementing the best of everybody's suggestions. So, thank you, HN for all your help! I feel this is an extreme overhaul I couldn't have done without your input. Since then, I have: Dramatically improved our hosting platform (So it HOPEFULLY won't go down this time (oops.)), Added two new units, Rebalanced all existing units, Added many more maps, Improved the…
2017
- 2
- 3AH
Point-and-click adventure with only one scenary! We tried to approach Minimalism trough gameplay. Isolated on a single stage, with a few a possible actions, you must endure trough a 40 days survival until the Sgt. Burden's crew can be rescued. Enjoy the puzzle and stay alive! And let me know if you have escaped the planet!
2013 · godswillbewatching.clay.io
- 4MA
I made an in-browser game called Meatshields (https://meatshields.com) which allows players to play a turn-based strategy game against many different players simultaneously. The game is heavily inspired by Advance Wars and I wanted to give people the multiplayer experience I loved from my childhood. I couldn't find an online version of the gameplay that I really loved (Advance Wars By Web (AWBW) is FANTASTIC, but there are actually a few gameplay mechanics in Advance Wars that I take issue with that I wanted to try to balance myself), so I decided to make my own. It's still pretty…
2017
- 5WM
Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…
2014
- 6MW
Hello, HN! I've posted a couple times here to get feedback on a strategy game I've been working on called Meatshields. All of your suggestions and feedback have been EXTREMELY helpful so I want to thank everyone here once again for generously helping me iron out kinks in the game. One big request I got the last time I showed the game was the ability to write your own AI for it. I thought about it and realized that would be totally do-able! The downside is that you have to host the AI service yourself, so it's sort of BYOAI, but it won't need to support a massive ton of requests or anything…
2017
- 7DA
over the past couple months, i've picked up an old project around writing AI in python. the premise is to code a strategy for an AI player to use in a simplified RTS game. the AI basically takes the seat of a human player and the human codes its brain. main site: http://okayzed.github.com/dmangame/introduction.html app engine server and match archive that runs and hosts games: http://dmangame-app.appspot.com github: http://github.com/okayzed/dmangame more AI: http://github.com/okayzed/dmanai i'm looking for players, comments, ideas, etc - thanks!
2011
- 8PG
I made a simple webservice to allow applications to be automatically aware of other users nearby. I made a demo of an HTML5 tankwars game to show it off. Play it here www.battlewith.me.uk Find the source code here https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server If anyone would be interested in using this to build something, mobile apps are the best target, give me a shout. I am very keen to see other people building on this.
2012
- 9IM
http://codewords.io/ I've been trying to get permission to run a game of it from the publisher and designer (CGE & Vlaada Chvátil) but I haven't heard back. I've found demonstrating that there's interest in what you're doing is the best way to get ahold of people. So.. Anyone interested in trying a massive game of Codenames over Twitch? Not quite "For Science!" more "For Engineering!" Which, let's be honest here, has a much better ring to it. If you'd like to know more, I put up an FAQ up here: http://codewords.io/faq/ If you'd like to sign up to help,…
2017
- 10
- 11BG
Tl;dr: Would like to hear thoughts on board games platform prototype (https://bordga.me/games/7) We are building an online board games platform which lets you create & play any board game online while video chatting with your co-players. Game play resembles the real world where users have to do everything from moving the pieces to enforcing the rules. We are quite early in our journey. We prototyped Chess to see if people would be interested in this direction. Please try it here! (https://bordga.me/games/7) You can enter your name that creates a new…
2021
- 12IB
I haven't seen anything like this so I decided to build it in a weekend. How it works: You see a bunch of things pulled from Wikipedia displayed on cards. You ask yes or no questions to figure out which card is the secret article. The AI model has access to the image and wiki text and it's own knowledge to answer your question. Happy to have my credits burned for the day but I'll probably have to make this paid at some point so enjoy. I found it's not easy to get cheap+fast+good responses but the tech is getting there. Most of the prompts are running through Groq infra or hitting a cache…
Apr 2026 · sleuththetruth.com
- 13SE
Hey, I've shared this game while it was still a work in progress in one of the Tell HN threads. I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of people tried it, and I got some positive feedback and constructive criticism. Anyway, I found a gamedev library I really like - Kaplay [1]. What I like about it is that easy things are easy. Meaning I could have fun building the game without learning (or fighting) a new tool. I always wanted to make games, but this is the first one I actually did. And I have to tell you - game development sparks joy! It combines so many things (game design, programming,…
Jan 2026 · muffinman-io.itch.io
- 14IB
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
- 15WM
The story For people based in Edinburgh (Scotland), you may know Codebase, the legendary co-working space and tech incubator. Few years ago, when the local coffee shop was called Elm cafe and run by Ally, her coffee machine would have a new fun fact written on it every day. All one had to do was to guess, is the statement Fact or Fiction? And Ally, also a great storyteller would reveal to you, whether you are in luck today. Some people (me) liked the joy of learning something new every day so much, that we decided to take it online. It was around that time when Wordle became a thing, so we…
2024 · dailyfactorfiction.com
- 16WA
I've been working on a browser-based programming game where you write bots to explore procedurally generated dungeons in any WebAssembly-compatible language. It's like a minimalist roguelike where your character's brain is a program you write. There are pre-made libraries for C, Rust, Zig, Go, and AssemblyScript. The game mechanics are intentionally simple for now, but the challenge comes from building up your bot's understanding of the world from limited local information. Your code needs to handle mapping, pathfinding, and strategy while dealing with monsters and potentially hostile other…
2025 · shaneliesegang.com
- 17OR
Hi I've created a text-based RPG game in which you can experience different adventures and play interesting characters while the AI acts as a real time DM/story teller. There are multiple ways to interact with AI: 1) Input free will move 2) Input default move (affects resources) 3) Post a question to DM Also one more cool feature is that you can create your own adventure via simple form. Add scenes, add characters and make it public so other players are able to test it. I also plan to have 'competetive' side where players will pay some small fee to creators in crypto depending on…
2023 · landing.v3rpg.com
- 18LO
I am from Double Stallion Games, and yesterday was the global launch of our first iOS game, Big Action Mega Fight!, or BAMF! for short. It's now sitting at #70 overall for iPad games on the US App Store and we're pretty stoked about it. Meanwhile, an Android version is in the works and coming soon. Most notably, we developed the game thanks to the support of an incubator/accelerator called Execution Labs, which was founded in Montréal and accepted its first cohort this past January (2013). Its model is similar to a miniature Y Combinator, focused specifically on mobile games. We get…
2013
- 19IB
I'm working on the Survival Crafting RPG that you would have played on your Apple II back in the '80s. You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based UI of the old Ultima games. It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot. I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. It's complete up through the Bronze Age (in Valheim terms). Let me know what you think!…
May 2026
- 20IM
AI usually does a terrible job acting as engaging NPCs in games. A few months back, I started trying to tackle this problem, initially with prompts and eventually with models fine-tuned on character interactions. I created this website as a testbed for the concept, and I open-sourced a fine-tuned model for those interested in experimenting with this themselves [1]. During the instruct tuning phase of training, LLMs learn to act as assistants. And they need to stop acting as assistants to produce engaging interactions. In Spellbound, telling NPCs they are AI will generally cause them to be…
2024 · tryspellbound.com
- 21IH
I started off with a simple goal: port the game Soldat to Typescript. I ended up not only with the game, but with a full system to train AI bots to play my own game, building a neural net to train new bot AIs from tens of thousands of simulated matches with different strategies. It also runs live all the time on my website and has a news dashboard and you can replay any game exactly. It all was a very fun way to dig into Fable's capabilities. The bill if I had done this with API billing? Nearly $2000.
Jun 2026 · soldat.bobbby.online
- 22SG
Hi everyone! Want to share something I'm working on. Here is the brief description: From a single text prompt, craft dynamic worlds (both fictional and real-life, of any kind) filled with interacting NPCs pursuing goals, and control (human-in-the-loop) their behaviour and world state in real-time. Text-to-image to visualise every single step of change in the world's and NPC's state. My main goal was to check if it's possible to use LLMs (GPT-4 currently) to make characters interact with each other but in the end, it ended up with a neat little app where users can interfere with NPC's (and…
2024 · github.com
- 23DV
I'm using AI (mostly Claude) to create/publish a new video game every day This is day 33, first stab at the tower defense genre. Most of the games (including this one) I build with a single prompt. Rarely, a couple extra prompts are needed for bug fixes or to tweak the physics/UI. Extremely rarely, the AI has difficulty making the game work right (usually drawing it) and it takes a dozen or more prompts -- but the majority of the time, it gets everything right and makes a fully playable game first try Happy to answer any questions, just a little hobby project of mine I'm having…
May 2026 · gamevibe.us
- 24IL
I am a 50-year-old who left a FAANG Engineering Manager job to build a sci-fi game. I just released Outsider, a sci-fi narrative game with multiple endings. If you want to support my work, the game is now 15% off (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/). I've always wanted to create a game. I moved from Brazil to the US to work at Big Tech, but after a career of customer focus, mission alignment and 360-degree feedback, I wanted to experience solo game development. While FAANG can be soul-crushing at times, I had a great manager and an amazing team. The pay and…
Nov 2025
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