I don't want to forget any, so I have built a directory/arcade for the games here that I maintain.
Feel free to check it out, add your game if its missing and let me know what you think. Thanks!
https://susam.net/invaders.html
Both were pretty well received here on HN. The second one is more popular with about 90 daily active users on an average, as far as I can tell from the logs after filtering out bots and scrapers. The first one has about 10 daily active users. Really tiny numbers, but it's a delight that some people out there return to this game regularly. Thank you, whoever you are.
Playing computer games is how I was introduced to computers. I too wanted to develop my own invaders-like game when I was about 8 years old. Unfortunately, I neither had enough access to computers nor sufficient programming skills at the time. The first link (invaders.html) is the result of fulfilling that childhood dream 30 years later.
Inspired by a few computer games from the early 1980s, the first game also includes an autoplay algorithm. If you leave the game idle for 5 seconds after loading, the autoplayer kicks in and starts playing the game automatically.
Each game is implemented in plain HTML and JavaScript as a single, unminified, easily readable HTML page. Anyone can download the page, save it locally, play it offline as well as inspect or tweak the source code.
(I too added one, https://mooncraft2000.com which I posted to HN some years ago. I should add https://kardland.com but I don't think I ever did a ShowHN for it.)
- https://craftmygame.com/game/e310c6fcd8f4448f9dc67aac/r/play
- https://craftmygame.com/game/f977040308d84f41b615244b/r/play
Each game I build adds to the component library: multiplayer, event systems, NPC behaviors, dialogues, etc... Currently working on a multiplayer Bomberman clone which is stress-testing the networking layer.
The engine/editor is at craftmygame.com if anyone wants to poke around!
May I request you to consider moving this project to a community organisation like https://github.com/<your-new-org> so that we, the HN folks, can maintain it as a community? Curated list projects often start with a lot of enthusiasm and I follow several similar ones focused on personal websites and blogs. While some of the curators remain active and maintain their project even years later, some do not. This isn't a complaint. I know life happens and circumstances change. So it is understandable that some of these projects become inactive later.
But it becomes a little problematic when someone wants to have their creation added to the curated list but cannot do so because the maintainer is no longer active. Of course, volunteers can fork the project and maintain it as a community but this is easier said than done. Once a 'Show HN' thread like this becomes successful, future visitors are more likely to end up on the original but no-longer-maintained curated list than the newer community maintained fork. For that reason, when I created my list of curated personal websites, I did so under the organisation <https://github.com/hnpwd> from the very start, and now we have multiple maintainers and contributors helping out with the curation.
Hosting the project under a community org with multiple maintainers could give it a better chance of staying active in the long term. This is only a request. I do not mean to impose or pressure you in any way. Please feel free to ignore the suggestion and thank you again for the work regardless.
This is important but seems orthogonal to whether or not the repo is under an org.
You can see the gaming happen early on in many of these lists, where commercial things start appearing quite highly, or weirdly the project get sponsored.
Once they get popular the creators abandon them and start ignoring the updates/PRs because their task of feeding traffic to their personal projects has been accomplished.
I'm also working on a new game at the moment. I have no idea how long it will take since I'm having too much fun coming up with new ideas and adding new levelsm but I'll definitely submit it here once I launch it.
I actually went to college for game development but never really built any games for myself because the time investment was just too large and the payoff too small. I really think that agent-driven development is the way for games, especially small games and to prototype gameplay mechanics. You no longer have to worry about how to factor your codebase when you just want to see if some idea works. This is especially the case when you put yourself in the constraints of a little virtual machine where you don't have to care much about assets, which are now definitely the bottleneck for this kind of thing.
These games are all unfinished, riddled with bugs, and almost none of them are actually fun (I like Traffic and Shapeship the most) but the thing is that I absolutely loved making them in a way that I haven't enjoyed making anything on a computer in a long while. It was so exciting to see doors that I felt were long since closed to me be blown wide open by agentic development.
[1] https://andrewgy8.github.io/hnarcade/games/games/lichess
There's a website for this here: https://locksteparcade.com/
It's still very much a work in progress, with just two games. One is a version of the classic game "Lemmings". The other is a very minimal asteroids style inertial ship duel.
The games both use deterministic execution in lockstep across network participants, and provide interactive gameplay and smooth execution even if situations with up to quarter or half second lag times, and the methods used for this are then perhaps one interesting aspect of the project.
In each game, the local player sees their own controlled entities at current positions, and other player entities at historical positions.
In the lemmings game, the complication is that lemmings depend on their own world changes (e.g. they need to stand on a bridge piece they just built). So there is a kind of fork and merge mechanism that enables local and remote world changes to be eventually consistent.
In the inertial duel game, homing missiles have a deploy phase in which they transition between different update time frames, with exactly the same sequence of updates applied on each machine, but with these updates accelerated or slowed down to achieve the time frame synchronisation.
There is an offline part with a tutorial to go through for the lemmings clone, which gives a flavour of the thing. The networking part uses a dedicated server and is currently invite only, but if anyone is interested in trying this then please shout and I can send out server credentials..
[0] https://github.com/s-macke/Interplanetary-Postal-Service
I opened that to see what are the most recommended games on the Hacker News (and perhaps posts introducing these, notes by authors, discussions).
Yet, I got alphabetic sorting. (Good for librarians, the worst possible for actual recommendations.)
How about: sorting some by upvotes and linking posts (with dates) when it was mentioned?
Also, if there is a game, instead of card with names, cards with screenshots would be infinitely better.
I've submitted Botnet of Ares [0], my hacking simulator.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/
Please check my HTML5 3D racing game :), it's an Arcade racer with dreamcast / PSX aesthetics and async multiplayer.
https://gamesnacks.com/games/52v00umba6lko#eids=95379098&sc=...
One idea: could you sort it by upvotes as well?