Show HN: Homegames. An open-source game platform I've been making for 8 years

59•homegamesjoseph•1h ago

I'm making a platform for simple open source games you can play anywhere.

Games are all just JavaScript classes and you can read the source of every game on the platform.

I started working on initial "games" (mostly rendering tests) in 2018 and eventually built all of the platform stuff around it to make it easy to share games.

There's also an in-browser editor available for you to make and publish games all from the browser.

Would love some feedback on the games and studio features as well as the platform overall. All of the code is available at https://github.com/homegamesio

Comments

nadermx•1h ago

I was just closelined by a beam in one of the games. Badass

homegamesjoseph•1h ago

Nice! I actually didn’t know the rendering stuff could support anything pseudo-3D like that until yesterday.

avaer•1h ago

Does everything need a "session"? Is it possible to have fully static games/exports?

homegamesjoseph•37m ago

One thing I forgot to mention is all of these games run server side and thin clients just render and send input back to the server. So a game session needs to exist for the back and forth communication to work.

Theoretically you could do this all client side too, but that would remove the magic of every game getting multiplayer for free

__del__•27m ago

as a matter of ux, users probably don't need to know that a session is being instantiated, and probably expect a simple play button

fun

homegamesjoseph•23m ago

Thanks for the feedback! Need a good way to clean up the UI to distinguish between joining someone's multiplayer session or creating your own

avaer•14m ago

If you architect your protocol cleanly, you should be able to run the simulation client side too without much effort (certainly the web platform has everything you'd need). This is how modern game engines do it, it goes back to the Quake VM and probably beyond.

You'd still get multiplayer "for free", but it could be turned on and off. You could do it with zero code change for the actual games, they don't have to know.

It seems some of the games could do with a singleplayer mode that doesn't depend on the backend having free slots.

Just an idea from a fellow web games person!

homegamesjoseph•10m ago

Thanks for the feedback! Local games weren't something I really considered until recently, but it would definitely be cool

HoldOnAMinute•1h ago

Does anyone remember "Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit" on the Amiga?

teddyh•48m ago

And for the Commodore 64.

Pxtl•12m ago

I was obsessed with the Arcade Game Construction Kit on the C64.

alienbaby•23m ago

And Amos and blitz basic

ViAchKoN•1h ago

Nice idea. I found a couple of interesting games on this.

Thanks for sharing! Cool that you haven't stopped working on this project after that long time. It gives me inspiration to work on my projects which I can't find time to finish.

homegamesjoseph•36m ago

Thanks! I'm planning on making a lot more. I made most of this stuff before AI tools were available. But now Claude can one shot really impressive stuff, it's amazing

matthewfcarlson•3m ago

I worked on a similar concept (padgames.io now defunct) that offered a state sync networking system with rollback netcode style stuff. It could handle exposing only certain information or fake info to certain clients (to prevent cheating). It integrated super nicely with vuex or react stores as it was all observable and all game actions just turned into state mutations.

I made the game I wanted, enjoyed it with family and friends, and then let COVID sweep it away. Congrats on continuing to work on it.

mantisman•38m ago

Very cool! Love seeing more browser games

homegamesjoseph•35m ago

Thank you! Obviously still some gaps to close but would love for this to carry on the spirit of newgrounds and stuff like that.

iamoseauditor•30m ago

Wow nice.

alienbaby•22m ago

Nice! Some fun making big chains explodey things :)

ricardobeat•18m ago

Could not play any of the games - too many requests errors. Why do they need "sessions", are they not running client-side?

homegamesjoseph•15m ago

I forgot to mention this in the post, but the games themselves run on the server. This gives every game multiplayer for free out of the box, and clients just read the server state and send back input.

The idea is that you could use a browser or custom client or whatever to connect to a game server

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Show HN: Homegames. An open-source game platform I've been making for 8 years

Comments

Reparaible and open source paper printer

Show HN: Homegames. An open-source game platform I've been making for 8 years

Organic Maps

Completing a Computer Science Degree on Coursera

New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]

The future of Flipper Zero development

Starring the Computer

Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata

Zero-copy in Go: sendfile, splice, and the cost of io.Copy

Dungeon Proof Crawler: learn how to write proofs with RPG

It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

Dependencies should be fetched directly from VCS

Pint in England

CoCom regulations and GPS receivers for balloons and cubesats

Cursed circuits #5: capacitance multiplier

You need a webring

Composite Video on the NES: Why's it so wobbly?

Show HN: Osint tool that finds exposed files on domains

Delta flight hit by firework while landing at Midway Airport on Fourth of July

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Had an idea for a Rust editor with simple Vim mode for learning

Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork

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DNSGlobe – Rust TUI to watch DNS propagate around the world

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The full stack of terminals explained

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