Games and gaming tools from Show HN — indie games, game engines, modding tools, and interactive experiences.
Strataris: Galactic Colony Defence — a ~1 MB native macOS mesh-terrain colony-defence shoot-'em-up, with zero asset files (everything procedural).
Procedural macOS shooter under 1MB generates every pixel and sound with zero asset files.
Pure SQL chess engine that actually plays, not procedural extensions or C bindings.
800 lines of pure C synthesizer turns mathematical chaos into IDM — demoscene craft.
Injects trivia by patching 1993 binary blobs in-memory without shifting a single byte offset.
Moongate is modern Ultima Online server built from scratch in C# with AOT compilation for high performance and nostalgic gameplay experience.
NativeAOT UO server with Lua scripting and hot-reload—early but genuinely solid foundation.
Emergent swarm intelligence puzzle with pheromone-only coordination; live leaderboard.
Real GDB debugging wrapped in a noir mystery — way more engaging than typical CTF challenges.
Live reload without losing game state beats Love2D's restart workflow for rapid prototyping.
Factorio meets Unix pipes—games 30+ command types live in a browser VM.
Turning Australia's dying payphone network into a territory capture game is brilliant.
A browser-based generative music sequencer built with JavaScript and Tone.js, designed for live performance and composition.
Single-file generative sequencer with harmonic drift that actually outputs a full album.
Phone-as-controller racing with haptics and physics that actually feels like a wheel.
Betaflight SITL lockstep lets you race autonomous drones before official simulators drop.
Separate clock-burn models make bots blunder under time pressure like real humans.
Arena FPS running entirely in-browser via WebAssembly with working P2P networking.
76K lines of TypeScript in 53 days with 95% Claude Code — gravity system actually works.
Clever use of eval() to turn JS trivia into a playable crossword grid.
Hand-tuned SSE particle engine from 2002 assembly, now runs in your browser via WASM.
Terminal battle royale — p2p over iroh, no central server. Play in your browser at play.royale.boxd.sh, or 'ascii-royale play' from a terminal. ASCII + 8-bit sound.
Battle royale over P2P with no server — pure ASCII, playable over SSH.
The open-source alternative to Minecraft: Java Edition, a complete block-survival game in ~45,000 lines of Swift + Metal. Zero dependencies, fully deterministic, singleplayer for now. Not affiliated with Mojang or Microsoft. We lowkey need y'all to submit bug reports cuz there are so many 😭
From-scratch Minecraft clone with hand-written Metal renderer and zero-dependency audio synthesis.
Webcam MTG player with ViT detection, faster than Spelltable's perceptual hashing.
Tal actually sacrifices unsoundly while Capablanca grinds endgames using style-extracted patterns.
Deterministic replay plus neural-net bots that train on each other — genuinely novel.
Inverted the usual approach: started with quantum structure, found the game inside it.
I built this in one day using 4 Claude Code sessions (~7,600 lines total, 4,300 in a single HTML file). No React, just one canvas + Web Workers. Cloudflare Workers + D1 backend. What it is: 300 dwarfs
Four-tier AI model routing with $8.50/hr budget cap is genuinely clever engineering.
Compiles 23k card rules from grammar at runtime instead of hardcoding every single card.
Using GPT-4o to dynamically generate evolution chains for any photographed animal is brilliant.
Native Xbox 360 recompilation hitting 165FPS at 4K without traditional emulation overhead.
Fitting a networked social client into PICO-8's 4KB cartridge using GPIO socket hacks.
Adaptive AI boss that learns across encounters, no HP bars—injuries actually matter mechanically.
Fills the PS1 recompilation gap that n64recomp solved for Nintendo 64 games.
Autonomous AI agents playing a persistent MMORPG while you just watch the chaos unfold.
Grooves live in URLs — fork, modify, resend without accounts or files.
Koch Method baked into boss battles instead of boring flashcard drills.
Spherical Go on a snub dodecahedron removes corners and edges entirely.
Petri net executor replaces the timeline entirely so visuals are the actual runtime state.
Reddit for interactive WebGL shaders with live math explanations built-in.
CoreWars for AI agents: elegant benchmark for multi-agent emergent behavior and evolutionary algorithms.
Roguelike built entirely in Windows File Explorer with drag-drop mechanics, ships March 2026.
Play live Minesweeper over SSH; genuinely clever bandwidth optimization unlocks real gameplay.
WASM + UDP-over-WebSocket gets Quake in your browser with mods in ~10MB Docker.
React state machine for games instead of Godot—10k players already voted on the price.
Game compiles your entire playthrough into a personalized novel—that's genuinely novel.
Instant browser play with no emulator setup beats itch.io for retro.
Zero-origin multiplayer fighting game running entirely on Cloudflare Durable Objects.
AI bot writing its own plugins to sell nonsense shirts is peak internet chaos.
LLM-driven game evolution where player wishes literally rewrite the code and spawn new assets.
Encoding Go moves as FTP filenames creates a playable game inside directory listings.
690 projects
