Show HN: The HN Arcade

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/ 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when someone wants to have their creation added to the curated list but cannot do so because the maintainer is no longer active.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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.