Alternatives
Products that do what TTF-DOOM – A raycaster running inside TrueType font hinting does
TrueType fonts have a hinting VM that grid-fits glyphs. It has a stack, storage area, conditionals, function calls, and it turns out it's Turing-complete. So I built a raycasting engine in the hinting bytecode. The glyph "A" in the font has 16 vertical bar contours. The hinting program reads player coordinates from font variation axes via GETVARIATION, does DDA ray marching against a tile map in the storage area, and repositions bar heights with SCFS. It ends up looking like a crude Wolfenstein-style view. Small visuzlization:…
- 1IM
I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…
2025 · github.com
- 2HT
During the hype of llama.ttf months ago, I was speculating the potential of WASM shaper for even crazier purpose, one that fitter to a font shaper's duty -- to synthesize font at runtime. This project as proof-of-concept implements a synthesizer that generates and rasterizes handwriting-style font, backed by a super-lightweight RNN model (~14MiB).
2024 · github.com
- 3QC
In the "Libre Barcode Project" discussion yesterday, 1bpp asked: "Is anyone willing to sacrifice their sanity for the sake of implementing a QR renderer as TTF hinting code?" Yes. I had some tokens to burn and was curious... turns out, it's possible. This was put together by a mix of Gemini, GPT, and Claude (depending on which usage limits kept running out).
Jun 2026 · qr.jim.sh
- 4D1
I made a Doom source port that runs within a PDF file. I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method. It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and…
2025 · doompdf.pages.dev
- 5VG
2021 · coderelay.io
- 6AM
Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…
2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com
- 7CF
2021 · codingfont.com
- 8TITetris in a PDF▲1,289
I realized that the PDF engines of modern desktop browsers (PDFium and PDF.js) support JavaScript with enough I/O primitives to make a basic game like Tetris. It was a bit tricky to find a union of features that work in both engines, but in the end it turns out that showing/hiding annotation "fields" works well to make monochrome pixels, and keyboard input can be achieved by typing in a text input box. All in all it's quite janky but a nice reminder of how general purpose PDF scripting can be. The linked PDF is all ASCII so you can just open it in a text editor, or have a look at…
2025 · th0mas.nl
- 9KR
I got DOOM running in KiCad by rendering it with PCB traces and footprints instead of pixels. Walls are rendered as PCB_TRACK traces, and entities (enemies, items, player) are actual component footprints - SOT-23 for small items, SOIC-8 for decorations, QFP-64 for enemies and the player. How I did it: Started by patching DOOM's source code to extract vector data directly from the engine. Instead of trying to render 64,000 pixels (which would be impossibly slow), I grab the geometry DOOM already calculates internally - the drawsegs[] array for walls and vissprites[] for entities. Added a…
Nov 2025 · mikeayles.com
- 10CS
I built this many years ago to try out rendering images in textboxes, using braille characters as groups of 8 pixels. You can try different fonts to see how the spacing changes too.
2024 · px.neocities.org
- 11SM
It's been closed source for a long time while I worked on it on and off as a hobby research project, but yesterday the repo was made public for the first time under the MPL 2.0 license. A feature reel showing its capabilities can be found here: https://ktstephano.github.io/rendering/stratusgfx/feature_re... A technical breakdown of a single frame can be found here: https://ktstephano.github.io/rendering/stratusgfx/frame_anal... It's still in a very beta state (bugs and instability expected), but I felt like it was a good time to make it…
2023 · github.com
- 12KB
Karektar is a React/TS app for building exportable bitmap fonts from custom glyph sets. You can submit your own input string, and the app will generate the gallery of unique glyphs. Build your own designs using the various tools available, then export it to an OTF format when you're done. This is my first front-end project, and one I picked up to learn React. I'd love to hear any feedback, especially on usability and additional features you'd like to see. Cheers!
2023 · karektar.newtrino.ink
- 13IV
This is a GPU "software" raytracer (i.e. using manual ray-scene intersections and not RTX) written using the WebGPU API that renders glTF scenes. It supports many materials, textures, material & normal mapping, and heavily relies on multiple importance sampling to speed up convergence.
2024 · github.com
- 14AS
2020 · dwitter.net
- 15CG
There are lots of glassmorphism generators out there, but I wanted to push the effect further! This project is the result of months of experimenting with CSS property layering and battling browser quirks. Cross-browser compatibility is actually the reason I rely on ::before and ::after pseudo-elements to build up the effect. Move the color/opacity to the main element, and you’ll get weird color bleed on the corners in Chrome. Move the texture, and it muddles the bevel’s specular highlight. Move the bevel, and it gets blurred out by the backdrop-filter. And so on! Layers include: *…
2025 · glass3d.dev
- 16AW
2025 · github.com
- 17IM
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
- 18MA
I always believe in using what one makes, which is unfortunate because I made Monocraft. For the past year I've been stuck looking at those pixels while I code, so over the weekend I tried my hand at making a version of Monocraft that was more legible. Introducing Miracode, a Minecraft programming font that is actually usable! Using a custom algorithm, I've converted adjacent pixels from the original font into strokes, which allow for a more smooth look while maintaining that Minecraft-y look. Give it a try and let me know what you think!
2024 · github.com
- 19DP
Hi HN, I’ve been working on Gore – a port of the classic Doom engine written in pure Go, based on a ccgo C-to-Go translation of Doom Generic. It loads original WAD files, uses a software renderer (no SDL or CGO, or Go dependencies outside the standard library). Still has a bit of unsafe code that I'm trying to get rid of, and various other caveats. In the examples is a terminal-based renderer, which is entertaining, even though it's very hard to play with terminal-style input/output. The goal is a clean, cross-platform, Go-native take on the Doom engine – fun to hack on, easy to read,…
2025 · github.com
- 20MP
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
- 21IM
2022 · brutalita.com
- 22TCtextshader.com▲260
TLDR: Click the link to see some cool visualizations, refresh a few times for random examples, and try editing some of the code yourself. This is a small weekend project of mine inspired by shadertoy.com It's a static single-page site hosted on GitHub pages so the website design is pretty barebones. I'm not a web developer so I mainly wanted to create a Cool Thing with my free time and not have to learn tons of front-end to do it. I'd love to hear what people think about it and please post or send me any shaders you make! You can use the link button in the bottom right to share. I hope that…
2022 · textshader.com
- 23MM
As part of the annual JS13K games challenge, I've put together a pretty large (but small-in-code) Metroidvania game that fits in just 13KB of compressed Javascript. The source is available here: https://github.com/arikwex/infernal-sigil NOTE: the current head of the main branch is at 13.6KB due to quality of life patches. The legit 13KB version is tagged in github. Useful hacks: - Using Roadroller (https://github.com/lifthrasiir/roadroller) for compression - Compressing the map data as grayscale PNG paired with some code generation. - Using procedural…
2022 · arineonshark.itch.io
- 24
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