Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to We made a game this week-end!
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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. We made a game this week-end! launched in 2014; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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I love getting cool swag from hackathons and I also love designing PCB's, so when my friend asked me if I would design hackathon badges for a large game jam in singapore, I was absolutely down! The theme of overglade was a "The game jam within a game", pretty cool concept right! High schoolers from around the world were flown out to the event by hackclub after they spent about 70 hours designing their own game. These badges needed to be really cheap and simple, because we were going to manufacture about a hundred in a pretty limited amount of time. I went with a zero-power approach, which…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3MF
2014 · 54.244.244.60 · its alternatives →
- 4AH
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 · its alternatives →
- 5
Hi everyone, I just saw a vibe coded game on HN, and thought maybe I should post about this here. I'm organizing a vibe coding game dev competition called Vibe Jam. Last year we did it too and there was 1000+ games submitted. This year the deadline is May 1 and you can submit your games until then. There's $35,000 in prizes with the Gold prize being $20,000. Let me know what you think! -Pieter
Apr 2026 · vibej.am · its alternatives →
- 6
Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com · its alternatives →
- 7OC
Hi Hacker News! My Co Co-op Matt and I are on a work term and were given the task of building a webapp that could make $20 in four weeks as our onboarding challenge. We're in the final stretch here and would sure appreciate HN's thoughts (we realize we kind of did this backwards, building something first before talking to people who might use it, but hey! We're leaning.). So basically, we tried to apply game dynamics to retaining visitors to websites by offering a reward (ie. discount coupon / premium content, etc.) for meeting various 'objectives' (ie. pages to visit). We call it ScavSite…
2011 · its alternatives →
- 8
Yeamt▲22Sick of AI tools and endless work? Try 30 seconds of chaos
2025 · game.yeamt.com · its alternatives →
- 9MW
Happy Halloween! Instead of going to a Halloween party this year, my wife and I decided to run a tiny Hackathon and built this little retro choose-your-own-adventure to pay tribute to a popular series of yesteryear. Try and escape! Also pumpkin mode!! We made liberal use of ChatGPT for code, DALLE3/Midjourney for images, but did most of the storyboarding/writing ourselves because we couldn't stand the style of GPT4/Claude.
2023 · tremella.github.io · its alternatives →
- 10
Well HN, I've finally produced something I think is worthy of sharing, but I didn't do it "in a weekend". Yeah, it's an iOS puzzle game. And yeah, it's a game I built because I wanted to play it rather than based on market research, so all this sort of makes it the antithesis of a popular HN post. But whatever. Still hoping for some of that patented (har har) expert HN feedback. Critique any part of it except the music. Also, PM me for upgrade codes, or I can post some here if there's any interest. Download (it's free):…
2012 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Hello HackerNews, I'm Kaamkiya, the author of this program. It's a collection of minimal games made for terminals, like 2048, Hangman, and even two player games like pong. They're all text-based, but they can actually be quite fun. If you want to test it right now, you can do this: go run github.com/Kaamkiya/gg@latest I started this project out of boredom, honestly. I was bored, and when I'm bored I like to code or play video games. So I coded video games. I kept them really minimal though, because I'm not great at gamedev and thought it would be easier to contribute to text-based…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
I wanted to learn more about RAG implementations, so I built something to solve the constant digging through manuals whenever we play a game. It's fairly simplistic, but actually has worked pretty well for some of these conflicts. Everythings Open Source on GitHub if you're curious (or have ideas), and I'd love to hear feedback from fellow boardgamers!
2024 · gamegame.ai · its alternatives →
- 13MW
Link: http://xoxo.cm The idea here was to build a multiplayer game with the lowest possible barrier to entry to get started. That is, no registration, no game setup, as few steps as possible to actually start playing. There's not much substance here right now and there's still a few bugs that need to be hammered out. I'm also thinking of expanding on the idea with some other simple games down the road. Any feedback or suggestions on the concept in general would be much appreciated.
2011 · xoxo.cm · its alternatives →
- 14HA
Hello HN! Here's my November Startup Sprint project (coded in two days). http://hackerlunch.com It allows you to post your lunch plans and lets other hackers join you. I built this because I often see HN users are interested in meeting each other if they are in the same area. I am not a coder, so this version is very rough. If people use it, I will work with others to build a more polished version. I would love some feedback. What do you think? Is this something you will be using?
2010 · hackerlunch.com · its alternatives →
- 15IB
I had an idea for this concept for a while and decided to build a little website around it. It's kind of a silly idea but I'm really curious to see how it plays out. If you're a particularly curious person, be warned. By submitting a payment to the game, you get to see how many other people were curious enough to play. You will be ranked based on your payment amount, and get to discover some interesting insights about the game's dynamics. Hope you like it
2024 · thecuriositygame.com · its alternatives →
- 16IM
Hey there HN, I took a page from Wordle's mechanisms and made this game for fun for some friends and I. Check out Wheredle and let me know what you think of it! ↙ ↗ ↘ https://wheredle.xyz
2022 · wheredle.xyz · its alternatives →
- 17
I recently prototyped a web game for a nonprofit to highlight the dangers of phone addiction, but unfortunately I ended up making a really addictive game instead. :-\ I'm sharing this here mainly to serve as an indicator of what can be achieved early-2026 by a senior dev working with Opus 4.7 over 2 days using genuinely collaborative prompting. (ie plan->feedback->iterate) Hope it provides some inspiration or entertainment - there's a level editor too - maybe Hacker Newsers could share their favourite creations here? PS: If there's enough demand I'm happy to Open Source this (or DM me) -…
May 2026 · downtime.partridge.works · its alternatives →
- 18IC
Stack: WASM + Rust + Macroquad I saw that a company had posted a cool job ad where you had to apply directly via a REST API. That gave me the idea to gamify my resume as well. Since I was bored, I vibe coded a bit and voilà, the result was ready. I think it's something new and fun that might put a smile on people's faces. (Please don't spam my email address, but feel free to send me an email with your high score if you want!)
Feb 2026 · breezko.dev · its alternatives →
- 19
Request Anything You Want, Game, MOD, Cheats, Guides and Etc
2023 · patreon.com · its alternatives →
- 20HP
Hey everyone, I've been experimenting with collaborative learning and active learning for a while (I launched Coderoulette a couple of months ago) and I'm launching something new today that I'm really excited about. Online learning is pretty passive (video lectures) and lonely, and I think we could create an online learning experience much engaging and effective than that. Only 5% of people who start a Coursera course finish it. My hypothesis is that we can increase that number significantly by matching learners online in teams of 2-3 and giving them a real project to build together. On top…
2016 · its alternatives →
- 21
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 · its alternatives →
- 22
3hours to make, 100% vibe coding inspire by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39159418
2025 · verse8.io · its alternatives →
- 23
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 · its alternatives →
- 24PC
Built this with my roommate over the weekend. At the end of the game, GPT will share its reasoning for each choice, which yields some funny results and explains why its so hard to win. Enjoy!
2023 · codenames-with-gpt.netlify.app · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →