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

hhomegamesjoseph about 4 hours ago 30 commentsRead Article on homegames.io

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

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

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Discussion (30 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ricardobeat•about 3 hours ago

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

homegamesjoseph•about 3 hours 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

BSTRhino•33 minutes ago

Wow! Can you tell us a bit about what the past 8 years have looked like for you?

avaer•about 4 hours ago

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

homegamesjoseph•about 3 hours 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

avaer•about 3 hours 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!

purple-leafy•about 2 hours ago

This is something I’ve done with my web game, I run the entire simulation client side so as to never worry about scaling issues.

Why reach for a server unless you truly need one! My multiplayer mode is p2p planned

homegamesjoseph•about 3 hours ago

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

__del__•about 3 hours 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•about 3 hours 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

HoldOnAMinute•about 4 hours ago

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

teddyh•about 3 hours ago

And for the Commodore 64.

Pxtl•about 3 hours ago

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

alienbaby•about 3 hours ago

And Amos and blitz basic

purple-leafy•about 2 hours ago

I like the concept and tried to play some games by starting or joining sessions, either nothing happened or I got disconnected straight away?

Anyway nice concept. I’m also making web games (see my post history) so if anyone wanted to connect and discuss, send me an email (in profile too)

homegamesjoseph•about 2 hours ago

Sorry about that, looks like the traffic spike from HN overwhelmed my session management stuff. It will only get better!

purple-leafy•about 2 hours ago

No need to be sorry! Good job on launching and working on it for years. It’s awesome. These launch hiccups happen.

Just keep pushing, I know how hard it is

ViAchKoN•about 3 hours 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•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours 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.

versteegen•about 2 hours ago

Isn't it strange, how some incredibly crude game written in the 80's will probably live forever in an archive somewhere, while the sophisticated things we create today are amazing but too numerous to be preserved or remembered. Working on a rollback netcode system as well currently.

homegamesjoseph•43 minutes ago

Even a similar name! That’s awesome.

lukasco•about 2 hours ago

Fun, seems to be working. Do you have levels? All the games I played seemed to have a static level.

homegamesjoseph•44 minutes ago

Thank you! I don’t have any super fleshed out games with progression yet. I have some ideas but the most thorough game at this point is vegas trail. The balancing is busted in that at the moment. Will definitely fix that and make more games with some depth

alienbaby•about 3 hours ago

Nice! Some fun making big chains explodey things :)

nadermx•about 4 hours ago

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

homegamesjoseph•about 4 hours ago

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

mantisman•about 3 hours ago

Very cool! Love seeing more browser games

homegamesjoseph•about 3 hours 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•about 3 hours ago

Wow nice.