Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Wadzilla. Play DOOM in Zork
Wadzilla is currently a PoC. Although in theory it “works”, it does not create an entertaining experience as a game, although to me it is quite fun just too see it output ZIL for all of the rooms in a DOOM WAD, with all of the objects in all of their correct locations by their plain English names, along with the 8-character names for the textures of the walls, floors, and ceilings in their relative positions in the room. Part of that enjoyment of course comes from knowing what it entails just to get that far, so the amount of entertainment you derive from that may be far less. In fact, I…
Wadzilla is a proof-of-concept tool that converts DOOM WAD files into interactive fiction written in ZIL (Zork Implementation Language). It translates DOOM level geometry, objects, and textures into text-based room… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Wadzilla. Play DOOM in Zork launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
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 · its alternatives →
- 2D1
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 · its alternatives →
- 3IW
I grew up on the Infocom games and when microsoft actually open-sourced Zork 1/2/3 I really wanted to figure out how to use LLMs to let you type whatever you want, I always found the amount language that the games "understood" to be so limiting - even if it was pretty state of the art at the time. So I figured out how to wrap it with Tambo.. (and run the game engine in the browser) basically whatever you type gets "translated" into zork-speak and passed to the game - and then the LLM takes the game's output and optionally adds flavor. (the little ">_" button at the top exposes the…
Jan 2026 · infocom.tambo.co · its alternatives →
- 4KR
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 · its alternatives →
- 5
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 · its alternatives →
- 6
Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games Tldr: We’ve made a framework for web-based board games. You can try out some games over at https://boardzilla.io, or you can take a look at https://docs.boardzilla.io to learn more about how to develop your own game. Source is available at https://github.com/boardzilla Hey y’all. My brother and I have made a framework for board games. During the pandemic we started to look at BGA but got discouraged by how old-fashioned the tools were and how cumbersome the development process was. We set out…
2024 · boardzilla.io · its alternatives →
- 7IM
Hi HN! I made many small web games in the past with Unity or Phaser. But this time I wanted to make something completely on my own. So I coded a basic game framework in plain JavaScript, and used it to make Almost Pong. This was a really fun project that taught me a lot about JavaScript, and I plan to make more minimalist games with this framework. Interesting fact: Almost Pong doesn't load any assets, all sprites and sounds are generated with code. Happy to answer questions, and please let me know if you have any feedback on the game. Thanks!
2022 · lessmilk.com · its alternatives →
- 8
2015 · twitchinstalls.com · its alternatives →
- 9
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 · its alternatives →
- 10
A Simple Unix-like operating system. Contribute to ozkl/soso development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
A simple text-based adventure game. Contribute to skx/lighthouse-of-doom development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Apr 2026 · spectrelang.org · its alternatives →
- 13DI
2024 · chrisdalke.com · its alternatives →
- 14OC
2024 · ludocode.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Modd.io is a collaborative game editor that runs in browser. It's kind of like Figma for game dev. We made this engine low-code and multiplayer-first, so developeres can quickly prototype casual multiplayer games. I hope some of you guys will find this useful. Would love to hear feedback also. Thank you. Engine Demo: https://www.modd.io
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16IM
Hi, As a 8-bit C64 game coder in eaarly 90ties and currently mostly FE-focused dev, decided to give a go to a simple retro game archive. This is purely fun project - so i decided to post it to HN, mayne it'll resonate :)
2023 · polishpixels.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Retro RPG Game Maker. Contribute to ericoporto/fgmk development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Ziva.sh ▲82Hey everyone! Wanted to show off a little side project I've been working on. A lot of people have been using AI to one-shot games, but they're often quite buggy - glitchy graphics, collisions aren't setup, or regressions in earlier levels. With an AI playtester in the loop, I've been able to one-shot games like Candy Crush or Crossy Road that would previously have bugs like cut-off UIs or stuck retries. The way it works basically goes like this: 1/ The playtester starts by reading the code to understand what its parent AI is asking it to play, and to decide what breakpoints, hooks and…
Feb 2026 · ziva.sh · its alternatives →
- 19IM
Hi, I've been developing an HTML5 MMORPG game where people can submit code to play a game, like collect items, destroy defense towers or kill monsters, etc.. I've been working on this for over 1.5 yrs (all my spare time) and now it's ready for preview, does anyone want to try it out? It's mostly opensource (and the rest will be opensource sooner or later) Please access it with PC, it's an HTML5 game: https://bytelegend.com/ I really want it to expand to more languages, but right now I've only finished Java part. I wonder if anyone can help me with other languages. Besides, I'm…
2022 · bytelegend.com · its alternatives →
- 20TP
This is the inevitable post after jeff_harris released restful-doom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919534 twitch-plays-doom is a Python Twitch IRC->restful-doom proxy to control doomguy with a staggering 8 second delay. The project was Saturday night's 'I wonder if I can make this work' session. Since it's been live there has been a team of four successfully make it to half way through E01M01. I've since added godmode to the chat (you can guess the command). This was fun, hope others get some enjoyment out of it. Twitch Stream/Chat…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 21
I recently brought Infocom's original UNIX z-machine source code back to life on modern systems. The modified source code, instructions on usage, a build of the z-machine, and examples of embedded game executables are available. There is also a detailed write-up about the state of the original source code, the porting process, and the invaluable role Justine Tunney's Cosmpolitan project played in bringing the Zork trilogy (and more) to Windows/Mac/Linux/bsd for arm/x86 machines over the course of a lazy Sunday.
2025 · christopherdrum.github.io · its alternatives →
- 22
Hello HN, Just wanted to show this little 2D game engine that I've been working on for some time (around 2 years on the editor part, longer on some of the components). It's quite full featured but obviously this a project of such magnitude already that the work never really ends. That being said it's definitely already at a point where games can made and published. The editor runs natively on Windows and Linux using Qt5. The games can run on both Win and Linux as well as on WASM with WebGL. Feature wise there's a bunch of the stuff you'd expect. Audio, graphics, scripting,…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23H0
Hello, Hacker News! My name is Lillian (see: http://about.lillian.link/), and I just released version 0.2 of my MIT-licensed game engine, Hypatia(http://lillian-lemmer.github.io/hypatia/). Hypatia is a game engine for single player 2D action adventure games. You can use it to make a game like Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Hypatia is aimed at non-programmers and programmers alike. I'm seeking any sort of feedback. Hypatia supports FreeBSD first, but has great support for just about any platform…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 24
Playground for the fire effect from DOOM. Really simple algorithm and all experiments are welcome! - filipedeschamps/doom-fire-algorithm
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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