Show HN: I built 80 mini-games using Fable before it was shut down

Show HN: I built 80 mini-games using Fable before it was shut down(minigames.world)

34 points by legocoder 3 hours ago | 22 comments

Dear Hacker News,

I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance!

For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency.

I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics.

$2,300 in API tokens...

Cheers!

Planktonne 3 hours ago |

Why?

You've made 80 quite janky, simple copies of existing games, and put them on a site with awkward tagging.

I get that the fact you could generate them all is exciting in itself, but better free versions of these already exist everywhere online; why would someone pay you for this, and why is it something you want to spend time on?

jp0001 3 hours ago | |

Agree. If this was this was just "look at what Fable could do quickly" that's fine. But saying it's free for now is funny. Anyone else could just make games they want to play locally for themselves and their friends now. And there are better ones online.

echelon 3 hours ago | |

The value of all software is going to trend to zero soon.

I don't know why anyone thinks they can sell software anymore.

You're going to sell outcomes.

bluefirebrand 3 hours ago | | |

Who has been selling software for the last... 15, 20 years?

SAAS took over the software industry. Software as a Service. If you work in SAAS you sell a service not software

Which is actually why the software industry sucks now. I'd much rather build products to sell than "services"

jp0001 3 hours ago | | |

Gotta have a moat.

vunderba 3 hours ago |

So here goes:

*Pros*

- Very well polished

- Thematically consistent

*Cons*

- Not a lot of uniqueness in these games; most of them seem to be clones.

To that end, I'm legitimately confused about what the OP is expecting to get out of this site. They can't seriously be expecting to generate any significant amount of revenue. They’d be lucky to make enough to pay for the domain. Vanity domains (like those ending in .world, etc) often give a hefty discount for the first year. But by the next year, you’re suddenly paying $20 or $30 a year for that domain.

The graveyard of Show HN, even from the last few years, is littered with the corpses of *.app, *.ai, and *.social sites.

I think they’d be lucky to even cover the cost of this top-level domain, especially considering how many all in one mini‑game arcade/portal browser sites already exist and that was before the rise of large language models.

himata4113 3 hours ago |

What blows my mind is how long fable can go without human input. I played a few and all these games would need at least 2-3 hours of back and forward with a raw version of opus. Of course we have harness tools that can achieve nearly identical results, but it appears that fable has created its own meta-harness inside itself to expand a prompt into a full plan before execution which makes me think a lot of these improvements come from baking claude code data directly into the model and simply adapting the entire manual process of the "back and forward".

I guess that would explain why fable feels like it is able to guess what the human input will be before it ends turn and continue working.

dc3k 3 hours ago |

> I built

Seems more accurate to say “an LLM ripped off”

variety8675 3 hours ago |

> The games, text, graphics, and other content provided through the Service are protected by copyright. You may play the games for private, non-commercial use in your browser. Any further reproduction, distribution, or commercial use requires the provider’s prior consent.

Can AI generated content be copyrighted?

vunderba 3 hours ago | |

Given that the majority of the games seem to be LLM generated knockoffs of existing games, I'd wager any IP law would be paper thin here.

I love how Fable "decided" to get around this issue by just renaming things - it's not Tetris - it's Cobalt Vault!

Why no sir, these aren't Fruit Loops - they're Sugar Toroids!

londons_explore 3 hours ago | |

No, but you only need to mix a few lines of your own code in and there is copyright protection - and there is no need to tell anyone which lines you wrote.

vunderba 3 hours ago | | |

Well it's not like it's really relevant in this situation. You could just point Fable at this website or any website with hundreds of mini games and ask it to clone them. Now "mix" in your own lines of code. Launder and repeat.

markus_zhang 3 hours ago |

Mark my word, resource restraint is a GOOD thing — as long as it is not resources that you rely on for living.

aspect0545 3 hours ago |

Congrats, it’s a nice collection. I’m not a big fan of the visuals though, it looks too much like any cheap AI / blockchain project. That‘s just me though.

GaggiX 3 hours ago |

I guess we can start a chain of comment listing their favorite ones, I haven't tried many but "wobble stack" is pretty cool and simple, "Starfall Defense" is a much more complex game but I love tower defense.

agnishom 3 hours ago |

Are any of these games fun to play?

cr125rider 3 hours ago | |

I think so. In the same way their source material is fun I guess

cwmoore 3 hours ago |

What was your prompt?

bmusuku 3 hours ago |

thank you, I loved checkers

briangao 3 hours ago |

what is the point of this? it doesn't matter how many games you can make in 4 days, none of these are of high quality, this is useless

hsuduebc2 3 hours ago |

Just ouf of curiosity. Is there any business model behind it or it's just for fun? I mainly struggled with my AI projects to give them care after I finished them, so I'm interested in your direction.

zem 3 hours ago | |

I am guessing the people most disappointed with AI in the long run are the ones wanting some sort of arbitrage where they can generate products with low effort and then expect people to pay for access to them based on a paradigm where creating software at all required a lot of effort.

not intending to slam you personally, but the fact that you finished your projects and then lost interest in them is very indicative of projects done for the sake of generating something with AI just because you could.

I think the people who succeed will be the ones who are willing to develop a project with high effort, and then use the LLM to help with some of that effort. not just because in a world where everyone has access to the same AI code generators the effort is the value add, but because a good product genuinely does require a lot of human input and supervision being l beyond simply churning out code.

217 3 hours ago |

oh wow we really have poki / crazygames at home now