We Love Games So Much, It Was Hard Making This List

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you catch your pods.

After a long or stressful day, there’s nothing more enjoyable than a good game. Luckily, there are so many creators making unique games on Glitch. So whether you’re looking for inspiration for creating your first game or just looking for something to mess around with, we’ve got you covered.

“Galaxeroids” is a retro throwback game from software engineer Joe Gaffey who has been interested in both games and coding since he was young. “I remember seeing arcade machines probably in the early ’80s in local fast food restaurants and such places and thinking these were the best things ever,” Joe explained. “So colorful and loud and so different from anything else that was around at the time. And these were actually the first computers that I interacted with.”

Joe uses Glitch to put his different ideas down into code. In another experiment, he built “Rock-Star”, a clone of Guitar Hero/Rock Band which uses the Gamepad API and the Web Midi API.

Most recently Joe has tried 3D programming for the web. “I’ve gotten into driving simulators in VR, and that’s a whole different experience,” Joe said. “My latest experiment, which I called WD40 for some reason… [is] a physics-based driving simulator based on three.js with ammo.js physics.”

Another interesting game on Glitch is “Power Slides” from Byron Hulcher. It takes images from presentations, clip art, strange academic articles and puts them together in a randomly generated powerpoint presentation. Each person has to improvise their way through a presentation, trying to sell a product with the slides they’re given. So you might start with a slide that just says “Driving Directions for Dogs” followed by a picture of Kevin Bacon holding a baby with his face.

Finally, there’s a game called Figma Pacman from Gleb Sabirzyanov, which is a favorite of Keith Kurson, an engineering manager at Glitch. Figma is typically a design tool, but some projects on Glitch, we see it being used in a totally different way. “Figma Pacman is an example of an app where you, in Figma, draw a little maze like what Pacman runs through, and then Glitch users can plug in that URL and then play Pacman on that maze,” Keith explained. “It’s a really cool combination of two different tools and… shows off what Glitch games can look like.”

*Check out the full collection of games and make sure to listen to the Game On! episode of Shift Shift Forward.