Show HN: The HN Arcade

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

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..

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

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.