[HN Gopher] Show HN: The HN Arcade
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Show HN: The HN Arcade
I love seeing all the small games that people build and post to
this site. 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!
Author : yuppiepuppie
Score : 288 points
Date : 2026-01-28 10:50 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andrewgy8.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (andrewgy8.github.io)
| tippa123 wrote:
| 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.
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| Haha! Yeah that game is what wanted me to build this site :)
| Etheryte wrote:
| enclose.horse is fun, I wish they removed all the clearly fake
| high-scores though. It would be a lot more interesting to see
| the actual score distribution rather than thousands of points
| on a level where the perfect score is 50.
| tippa123 wrote:
| Unfortunately gaming and cheating go hand in hand. I haven't
| seen a level with thousands of points yet but every time a
| suspiciously high number of perfect scores.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Smart idea! Some curated graphics for each game in the preview
| cards would really enhance this. Nice "retro orange" on the
| landing :)
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| Thanks! It's in the works as well as screen shots
| stared wrote:
| 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.
| andvari_bekho wrote:
| 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=...
| smusamashah wrote:
| 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.
| mkw5053 wrote:
| Agreed. (someone else mentioned sorting by upvotes, which I
| like too) Also a thumbnail (or gif), just a way to convey more
| information about the game more quickly.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Came here to suggest the same: screenshot so I can get a
| taste of the game when browsing the list.
| heyitssim wrote:
| 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!
| tamasnet wrote:
| The games seem fun, and your beta site looks fantastic. I'm
| always awed and humbled by folks who have the vision & spend
| the time to create something like this.
| heyitssim wrote:
| Thanks! Still early days but it's been fun building. Happy to
| help if you ever want to try making something with it
| baby wrote:
| I've been playing with it in the last few days and really like
| UI, feels much more modern than rpg maker!
| heyitssim wrote:
| Thanks! What are you building?
|
| Some things RPG Maker can't really do: real-time multiplayer
| (works out of the box), web-native games (just share a link),
| and you're not locked to RPGs - platformers, survival,
| racing, top-down action all work too!
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Is there any text based programming environment for it? the one
| thing game engines like unity or unreal get right IMO is having
| a pretty GUI for doing basic things and prototyping while still
| having the text based programming available to modify further
| heyitssim wrote:
| Not yet - the no-code approach is intentional. One of my main
| targets is non-technical people or who want a quick prototype
| of their ideas.
|
| Text-based scripting adds complexity and security concerns
| I'd rather avoid for now.
|
| That said, if users start asking for it, I'll reconsider.
|
| What would you want to do with code that feels limited in the
| visual editor?
| mghackerlady wrote:
| I don't know (I haven't used the editor, my work network
| blocks domains with "game" in it) but in most of the "no
| code" solutions I've tried it's simply faster to define
| things in text than to try and figure out how to represent
| that with the graphical tools given. It also allows for
| code to be transferred between projects easier
| carra wrote:
| Nice idea! It would also nice to have a similar post about
| consoles or game devices discovered through HN.
| tiniuclx wrote:
| 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/
| hebejebelus wrote:
| 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/
| baxtr wrote:
| Very nice! Like it a lot.
|
| One idea: could you sort it by upvotes as well?
| crispweed wrote:
| 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..
| s-macke wrote:
| 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
| calflegal wrote:
| Just submitted https://migo.games/arrow (a multiplayer arrow
| shooting game)
| eamag wrote:
| Nice! I wanted to do the same, but wanted to do youtube videos
| first https://eamag.me/2026/Best-HackerNews-Videos
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Enclose horse is probably my favourite game of all time. There's
| just something about enclosing horses.
| guzik wrote:
| Same here! Still on a streak since day one
| brianzelip wrote:
| Code: https://github.com/andrewgy8/hnarcade
| koito17 wrote:
| 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
| rjh29 wrote:
| Items that were found by "HN scraper" have working Show HN
| links. The rest for whatever reason have a non-working link.
| Probably more likely that the code was generated by LLM and is
| full of bugs.
| simonklitj wrote:
| (Not OP) I don't think so, you can find the scraping code here:
| https://github.com/andrewgy8/hnarcade/blob/main/scripts/scra...
| rjh29 wrote:
| 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
| kingofspain wrote:
| 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.
| vldszn wrote:
| very cool!
| susam wrote:
| 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.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Most of the "Awesome XXX" lists are designed solely to promote
| their creators pet project.
|
| 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.
| password4321 wrote:
| > _multiple maintainers and contributors_
|
| This is important but seems orthogonal to whether or not the
| repo is under an org.
| orsorna wrote:
| The org should also curate selections. Particularly only games
| that have been well received in past HN discussions, and if
| they have, the org _might_ add them to the directory.
| jmkd wrote:
| 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.
| susam wrote:
| Doesn't the 'paid' tag under the game description already
| address this concern?
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| 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.
| susam wrote:
| Submitted my only two rather humble attempts at 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 one among the two with about 90 unique visitors per day
| on an average, as far as I can tell from the access logs after
| filtering out bots and scrapers. The first one has about 10
| unique visitors per day. 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.)
| raphar wrote:
| 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)
| susam wrote:
| Indeed. This is precisely what we did for the HN Personal
| Websites Directory at <https://hnpwd.github.io/>. The website
| info cards are shown in random order, with the ordering
| reshuffled every hour.
|
| I am not a professional web developer but I have been using
| JavaScript since 2001 or so. It is only this month that I
| realised JavaScript does not have a way to seed the
| pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). So there was no way to do
| something like: srand(Math.floor(Date.now() /
| 1000 / 3600))
|
| As a result, I had to implement a linear congruential generator
| (LCG) based on the Knuth parameters:
| <https://github.com/hnpwd/hnpwd/blob/1e513b1/web/script.js>.
| When I first came across the LCG algorithm (in K&R with
| different parameters) in the early 2000s, I felt it was neat
| but assumed I would never need it, since almost every
| mainstream language comes with a reasonable PRNG. Little did I
| know back then that the most ubiquitous language on the web
| would make that old knowledge useful again, some 25 years
| later.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I strongly disagree with that. It's so irritating as a user
| when sites have a random ordering to things. I can envision a
| "random" button being useful, but not having a random order to
| the list.
| martinclayton wrote:
| Added mine ... let's see... https://foximax.com (word puzzle)
| lucideng wrote:
| These kinds of posts are what HN is all about.
| yathern wrote:
| Fantastic idea! I didn't see my https://words.zip game here so
| I'll submit it, even though it didn't get mucht traction on HN -
| it's up to 288,000 words found now!
| woutervdb wrote:
| I like the idea, but the UI gives me a headache, especially
| when the "found words" are still loading. I think it might have
| to do with the contrast?
|
| If relevant, I'm loading the website on a 27" IPS display under
| normal daylight conditions.
| yathern wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback, I've heard similar before and meant
| to make a lower contrast option - I'll definitely get on it.
| pooloo wrote:
| Just a thought, maybe a "tunnel vision" mask toggle? So I
| can focus on the center of the screen without all the
| peripheral noise. It doesn't have to be a significant loss,
| but dark edges and corners with a nice fade to the visible
| circle in the center. Whatever that equates to..
| yathern wrote:
| Oh that's not a bad idea, and easy enough to implement!
| I'll definitely get to it later today - I think because I
| play it on my phone the contrast is less obtrusive, but
| on a big desktop screen it's a bit boggling to look at
| labarilem wrote:
| Cool project!
|
| I'm building something quite similar at https://hn-
| games.marcolabarile.me/
|
| I manually curate the data and add images too. Code and data are
| open: https://github.com/labarilem/hn-games
|
| I've posted this project some time ago to HN but it didn't get
| much attention unfortunately.
|
| NOTE: Data includes games up to April 2024, I add more games when
| I have some spare time and plan to catch up to today's games
| asap.
| rockyj wrote:
| Wow! What a coincidence. I just launched this y'day -
| https://cric26.fun/
|
| I tried to go for deep cricket-ing gameplay and not graphics.
| People from the subcontinent should be able to enjoy it.
| oliwary wrote:
| Fun idea! I am glad there seems to be a community of people
| enjoying word games on HN, it tends to be the first place I post
| my games. https://squareword.org (wordle meets sudoku) and
| https://clickword.org (scrabble meets tetris... ish) are the
| largest so far.
|
| I think https://videopuzzle.org has a lot of potential also, but
| it targets an audience that's a bit different as it is more
| visual, focused on reassembling videos like a puzzle.
|
| Will post these to the arcade! :)
| Aperocky wrote:
| Great sales pitch, I'm guilty of fomo and added my stuff, kudos.
| elicash wrote:
| The list of submissions that haven't yet been added are here:
|
| https://github.com/andrewgy8/hnarcade/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...
| ChaosOp wrote:
| Very cool! Opened a PR to add my local multiplayer game platform,
| Gaming Couch (https://gamingcouch.com), to the list of games :)
| Just recently posted a ShowHN post about it which hit the front
| page and generated so much great feedback and discussions:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344573
|
| In a nutshell its a web-based game platform where up to 8 players
| use their smartphones as controllers to play real-time action
| mini-games on a central browser screen. It takes a lot of
| inspiration from classic party games like Jackbox, Mario Party
| and Mario Kart.
| ajjbones wrote:
| I saw your post a while back and decided to try out your game
| while a few friends were over. Everyone had a blast! Great work
| on the game, looking forward to more modes in the future :)
| legohead wrote:
| Wasn't 2048 first posted on HN before it got big?
| morserer wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566
|
| :)
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Massive list of related threads as of Oct 2024:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41938249
| egglemonsoup wrote:
| This explains the unusually large amount of traffic my game is
| getting today.
| vunderba wrote:
| Nice. Added a PR for my dual-snake game - a game for the highly
| dextrous who finds juggling while riding a unicycle to be a
| trivial exercise. I grew up playing danmaku games [1] so the line
| between fun and frustration is very blurry to me.
|
| https://mordenstar.com/projects/twins-of-caduceus
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_hell
| pokpokpok wrote:
| sandspiel has the wrong HN Thread id and github repo
| gowld wrote:
| The first game "1D-Pong" is tagged "browser", but it's actually
| an instructable for a hardware project.
| SteveChurch wrote:
| Love this. I've lost so many cool Show HN games to the void of
| "I'll check that out later." Finally a cure for my bookmark
| graveyard.
|
| I've submitted to add my SciFi Space MMO Game
| (https://play.delve-online.com) - Run mission, fly with friends,
| kill rats, pvp etc etc :D
|
| Thanks and have fun :D
| cionut wrote:
| Love this! Was thinking of building something similar at some
| point and for the same reasons. Glad you actually did it!
| jmpavlec wrote:
| Great idea! I added a github issue for my game platform
| https://gametje.com. It currently has 8 multiplayer party games.
| Play on your smart TV, laptop. phone to phone, or directly within
| Discord.
|
| I made a Show HN post back in November:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887709 but I've added two
| games since then.
|
| Thanks for creating this.
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(page generated 2026-01-28 23:00 UTC)