Discussion summary
Homegames is an open-source game platform developed over 8 years, receiving mixed reactions regarding its content and design. Users appreciate its concept and express interest in its continuation.
What the discussion says
- Some users criticize the featured game for its content.
- Others praise the platform's creativity and potential.
- There is curiosity about the site's design, like the double scrollbars.
“Having 'Weed Smoke Willie' on the front page isn't a good look.”
“Writing pearl-clutching comments on open source software isn't ideal.”
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- Hacker News
- Web games moved way beyong these style of games. Complex 3D using three.js and rigid body physics engines in wasm workers like rapier is feasible now. We can do full multiplayer pipelines with server authority, client prediction and reconciliation and still run at 60fps. Its really amazing what can be pressed into a single html these days.by usernam33
- Breakout is still a good game even though we can 'do 3D'by philipwhiuk
- Everytime I try and use one of those Complex 3D web games, all 8 cores of my computer go to 100% and my computer becomes unresponsive until I kill the web browser.
Its really amazing how inefficient those Complex 3D web games are.
by dosisking - Fun, seems to be working. Do you have levels? All the games I played seemed to have a static level.by lukasco
- 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
- I played weed smoke willie for way longer than I should admit. Stopped after something like $40k.by 20after4
- That is so cool, thank you for giving it a shot!
- Nice! Some fun making big chains explodey things :)by alienbaby
- 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.
by ViAchKoN - 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
- Does anyone remember "Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit" on the Amiga?
- And Amos and blitz basicby alienbaby
- And for the Commodore 64.by teddyh
- 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)
by purple-leafy - Sorry about that, looks like the traffic spike from HN overwhelmed my session management stuff. It will only get better!
- Wow! Can you tell us a bit about what the past 8 years have looked like for you?by BSTRhino
- Sure thing! Basically started making simple rendering tests over a websocket and then added images, font and audio support.
The initial idea was to make jackbox style games people could host on their computers and play on their phones in the same room over wifi.
Added to that and kind of did a whole lot of nothing productive around covid, just experiments that didn’t get deployed anywhere. And a podcast with over 100 episodes.
A few years ago my wife and I had our first kid, so I spent about a year polishing the self hosted stuff and figured I would put the project on the shelf.
So that’s pretty much what I did until around 6 months ago when I realized the actual Internet is fast enough to run these games outside of a LAN, and a lot of people including myself miss browser based games. That plus Claude making me way more effective in my limited free time led to the current state of things
- > Kaboom Valley
This game reminded me of Gorilla Basic (GORILLA.BAS), it really brought back some childhood memories, so nostalgic! Unfortunately, this Kaboom Valley game seem to be unplayable! None of the buttons is working for me and only the computer is able to fire its projectiles over my head :(
by redbell - I will take a look and publish a fix, thanks for checking it out!
- Reminds me of Scorched Earth.by marcomourao
- Hey I was looking for documentation to learn how to make my own games but I didn't see a link on the website. Do you have any docs? If so please consider putting a link to it on the front page.
I didn't try logging into the studio since it was asking for username and stuff, so maybe the docs are there? I just wanted to read the docs before committing to a login and stuff to see if this is worth my time.
by TiredGuy - Hey good catch, I will put up links to docs outside of the studio. The studio now has some samples for game node types, eg. shapes, text or assets as well as an llm-focused game guide you can dump into Claude or whatever to have it make games.
But will definitely add some more outside of the studio.
Thanks for checking it out!
- Does everything need a "session"? Is it possible to have fully static games/exports?by avaer
- 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
- Could not play any of the games - too many requests errors. Why do they need "sessions", are they not running client-side?by ricardobeat
- 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