Show HN: The HN Arcade

Did my part and submitted my only two games:

https://susam.net/invaders.html

https://susam.net/myrgb.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 love making games! I've been building a no-code game engine by extracting reusable components each time I make a new game. Started as a way to scratch my own itch, now it's becoming a proper platform. A couple games I've shipped with 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!

Enclose horse is probably my favourite game of all time. There’s just something about enclosing horses.

From reading the comments here, it looks like the arcade will soon double in size.

(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.)

Please show the game list in random order, or starting in a random position. Just to promote the discovery of the games later in the alphabet. (Or end up with games called ______11_roguexxx, lol)

This is great. Thank you for building and sharing it.

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 great! Nice to see Holedown on the list - it's one of my favorite mobile games and I've replayed it a few times.

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.

For a little while recently I did a weekly vibe game jam for myself using TIC-80 and Claude Code and had the best time.

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.

https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/07-tic80/

https://redfloatplane.lol/arcade/

I'm working on a game arcade thing as a hobby project, themed around lockstep networking.

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..

Nice concept. One question: was the data generated by an LLM? Don't mean this in a snarky way. The Lichess entry links to a non-existent HN thread[1], and "Show HN: Lichess" does not appear in HN search results. I found a hit for a Lichess client written in Elisp[2]. At least I discovered a cool piece of software.

[1] https://andrewgy8.github.io/hnarcade/games/games/lichess

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779861

Does it have to be submitted to HN before? I made Multi-Animal Spree Popper - game about popping animals for iOS (https://maspgame.com/) but never posted here for fear of being seen as spam. I ofc am considering rewriting in Rust to make it more palatable.

First item I clicked: github link is 404, HN thread goes to wrong comment. The game link itself works though!

https://andrewgy8.github.io/hnarcade/games/games/sandspiel

Thanks. I have submitted my platformer "Interplanetary Postal Service" [0]. This is a lunar lander type game with real computational fluid dynamics.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/Interplanetary-Postal-Service

Thank you for sharing! I like the idea, I feel there is some work ahead so I could find it useful.

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.

Nice! I wanted to do the same, but wanted to do youtube videos first https://eamag.me/2026/Best-HackerNews-Videos

Is there a way to see the most popular / highest voted ones? If every submission makes it to the list it will collect lots of clutter.

Code: https://github.com/andrewgy8/hnarcade

Thanks a lot for this, what a great idea!

I've submitted Botnet of Ares [0], my hacking simulator.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/

Smart idea! Some curated graphics for each game in the preview cards would really enhance this. Nice "retro orange" on the landing :)

Great idea!

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=...

Just submitted https://migo.games/arrow (a multiplayer arrow shooting game)

Nice, except, first game I clicked is now only pay-to-play on major platforms. I'm not against that, but it doesn't feel like a Show HN game anymore which I kind of expect to be a little rough and ready and certainly free to play. Perhaps this could be noted in the listing? I mean it's a success for the developer, not a downside. Game was Holedown.

Nice! There are some great games on HN, but it’s difficult to catch them all. Shout out to the creator of enclose.horse, I’ve been playing this every day since I saw it on HN.

Nice idea! It would also nice to have a similar post about consoles or game devices discovered through HN.

Very nice! Like it a lot.

One idea: could you sort it by upvotes as well?

very cool!

[dead]