This is a list of small, free, or experimental tools that might be useful in building your game / website / interactive project. Although I’ve included ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools and toys that are as fun to use as they are functional.
The goal of this list is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens.
Sunfish is a simple, but strong chess engine, written in Python, mostly for teaching purposes. Without tables and its simple interface, it takes up just 111 lines of code! Yet it plays at ratings above 2000 at Lichess.
Because Sunfish is small and strives to be simple, the code provides a great platform for experimenting. People have used it for testing parallel search algorithms, experimenting with evaluation functions, and developing deep learning chess programs. Fork it today and see what you can do!
A graphic artist is recreating logos, backgrounds, and other assets from the Cyberpunk 2077 game as regular images and SVGs. Check back periodically!
How to solve the 3x3 Rubik's Cube. Go back a couple of pages and you'll find the algorithms for the other variants.
Actively maintained open-source game remakes.
Chains Invent Insanity is a Cards Against Humanity answer card generator. As the name suggests, it generates cards based on a Markov Chain compiled from a wordlist. This wordlist is comprised of every single (official) answer card ever written for every edition of the game.
Rewtro is a weird retro game engine inspired by fantasy consoles and code golf that runs games encoded in a very small amount of data (2kb/3kb). This way is possible to share games using exoteric and usually data inefficient ways: i.e. sticking some PWA magic and a QR-Code reader to the engine I've made a fake gaming console for mobile devices. Games are coded using JSON structures. Includes tools for more easily building such games.
The Break Into Chat wiki was created to preserve the history of these and other BBS door games, after editors on Wikipedia began deleting door game articles.
No, I don't know why this has an IP address. It used to be part of bombjack.org.
A collection of free homebrew games for a number of (emulated) systems, packaged for easily running on a Retropie.
Devilution has also been ported to WebAssembly, so you can play Diablo in your web browser (again, assuming that you have the legit commercial or shareware release .mpq files).
If you just want to give it a spin: https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/
The classic book BASIC Computer Games, published by Creative Computing, inspired a generation of programmers. The games were written by many people, and compiled by David H. Ahl. The fabulous illustrations accompanying each game were done by George Beker.
I've included all the games here for your tinkering pleasure. I've tested and tweaked each one of them to make sure they'll run with Vintage BASIC, though you may see a few oddities. That's part of the fun of playing with BASIC: it never works quite the same on two machines. The games will play better if you keep CAPS LOCK on, as they were designed to be used with capital-letter input.
The collaborative, web-based, massively multiplayer game Glitch began its initial private testing in 2009, opened to the public in 2010, and was shut down in 2012. It was played by more than 150,000 people and was widely hailed for its original and highly creative visual style.
The entire library of art assets from the game, has been made freely available, dedicated to the public domain. (CC0)
qtMUD is a Python package containing a MUD driver written by emsenn and released under the MIT License.
Somebody ported the original ADVENT to Python 3. This implies that it can be built into or called from stuff.
A retrofuturistic transhuman game where you hunt down uploaded renegades in a mesh network.
I'm not sure what kind of game this is. It starts with an avatar generator of some kind.
A collection of text art and photographs with an 8-bit aesthetic.
OpenDUNE is an open source re-creation of the popular game "Dune II", originally made by Westwood Studios, and released by Virgin Entertainment. It attempts to re-create the original game and apply modern technology to it to allow it to be run natively on most operating systems.
OpenDUNE is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0.
An online password generator/decoder for the Mega Man games, Castlevania 2, Metroid, Solar Jetman, the Guardian Legend, Faxanadu, and Battle of Olympus. Pick the options you want and it'll build you a password. Type in a password and it'll show you what it means.