Play Solhopper – A Minimalist Game In ~500 Lines of HTML/CSS/JS
Hi HN! I'm excited to share SOLHOPPER, a minimalist game I'm building in just ~500 lines of HTML/CSS/JS. Here's a breakdown of the development process and some fun quirks of the game: Challenges and Fun Facts: - World Building & Math: Crafting the initial world and refining the game mechanics to keep it simple and compact was the toughest part. The back story is that you play as a Solhopper captain traveling away from earth at 10% the speed of light to capture solar flairs which unlock endowments (bottom left) to develop that star system. These endowments were setup by benefactors…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! I'm excited to share SOLHOPPER, a minimalist game I'm building in just ~500 lines of HTML/CSS/JS. Here's a breakdown of the development process and some fun quirks of the game: Challenges and Fun Facts: - World Building & Math: Crafting the initial world and refining the game mechanics to keep it simple and compact was the toughest part. The back story is that you play as a Solhopper captain traveling away from earth at 10% the speed of light to capture solar flairs which unlock endowments (bottom left) to develop that star system. These endowments were setup by benefactors centuries ago! I was playing around with Compound Interest and Galactic Timescales. - HTML: Remembering how to implement the initial popup screen with plain CSS was a bit of a refresher. The HTML is only 20 lines of code. - CSS: Styling without frameworks was a refreshing and enjoyable experience! I was able to design with around 100 lines of CSS. How refreshing is that! - JS: This is my first game in a while, and I aimed to use plain JS. The entire game runs on 398 lines of code, and I think there's still room for optimization. - Deployment: I'm using the free tier of Netlify to host the game. - Bugs: My favorite bug so far is when you leave the tab and come back a few minutes later, all the stars appear at once in a donut shape. It's oddly satisfying, so I'm keeping it in for now. - Grid: I almost forgot the grid! pressing the G key enables both square grid and then concentric circle grid. I had so much fun designing the circle grid and think it helps with high scores as the gameplay get's harder! - Game Stats: - Top Right: Current orbit (based on Earth years, starting from 1665 AD) - Bottom Right: Current radius of the "civilsphere" (a concept from the book the game is based on) - Top Left: Ultimate high score - Bottom Left: Current value of each star system endowment - Top Center: Total stars captured by you, the Solhopper captain - Origins: The game evolved from a sci-fi book I'm writing, which combines the concepts of compound interest and galactic time scales. The book is about 60 pages long and still in editing. You can find it hidden in the code (it's a bit rough and unedited). - High Score: It would be fun to use the comments as a leaderboard! My highest score so far is 157 stars captured, with a total endowment value of $Infinity. Check out SOLHOPPER and let me know what you think! Any feedback or high scores would be greatly appreciated. Play SOLHOPPER here: https://www.solhopper.com/
Does the same job
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hi all, I've always wanted to make my own game, but couldn't afford a thousand-dollar adobe (flash+photoshop) license. I'm not a talented programmer, have no degree in CS. But I understand some elements of design. So I got me a copy of ImpactJS, and after about 5 months of steep learning curve (at least for me), I managed to come up with a game. I also integrated it with a highscore and badge system, similar to what you get at Kongregate. You need to login with Google/OpenID to earn badges/scores. link is: http://www.hotbazooka.com/privatejoe hope to hear some feedback/questions from you guys!
- ISI spent 6 years making a cool free game2015 · ▲151
Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I've just reached beta in my game BoxByte Lyte. -What is it- It's a free 3d arcade game for hardcore players that uses color matching in interesting ways. Also it's a one button game, well movement and one button. Cool huh? The final release will be free too. -What I need- This is a very challenging game, so I really need to balance the difficulty so that it's still hard but not impossible. It would be great just to hear your experiences of the game and how far in it you got. -Where can I report bugs?-…
- IBI built 80 mini-games using Fable before it was shut downJun 2026 · minigames.world · ▲54
Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
- ASA small browser game (PC only) built with Phaser 32025 · cubic-zombies.pages.dev · ▲9
Hi HN! This is my first game — something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a small browser game built with Phaser 3, React, and the phaser template (https://github.com/phaserjs/template-react-ts/). I made it in 2 days (like 8 hours in total real time) using gemini-cli. About 90% of the code was generated with AI, but I learned a lot by making fine tweaks. It only works on PC since it’s a typical WASD + R (reload) shooter. I’d love feedback on: - Gameplay (is it fun, too hard?) - Ideas for new features Thanks in advance! ps: I used cubes as a prototype, but now I kind of…
- AAAlien Abducto-rama: a FUN browser game I made with my kidsJan 2026 · studio.mfelix.org · ▲6
I built this over the holiday break with my two girls (ages 6 and 8). You pilot a UFO and beam up humans, cows, cats, dogs, and sheep for points. They drew all the art while I talked to Claude Code to scaffold the game logic. The magic moment was watching my kids use voice dictation to talk directly to Claude Code. My 8-year-old asked for a "purpler" tractor beam and watched it change in real time. She wasn’t coding, but she _was_ driving: describing what she wanted, testing the result, and iterating fast. It was really cool to watch... later on she asked me what javascript was and we dug…
- AQAldren Quest – Browser RPG2024 · whimsicalwyrm.itch.io · ▲6
Hello everyone! I've finally finished my latest side project - a RPG game made in Blazor. It started as a small project to learn some Blazor (I'm .NET dev but kept mainly to backend and ASP.NET). I had such a good time coding it that at some point I decided to make a full featured game out of it. I might've have bitten off more that I could chew as RPGs have so many systems and elements but overall I think it worked out well, especially for a single person project. I want to hop on the next project soon so any comments/questions/tips than can make me better really appreciated!
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