C++ Game development

Open-source C++ projects categorized as Game development

Top 23 C++ Game development Projects

Game development
  1. Godot

    Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

    Project mention: VisionOS Godot Engine support merged | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-20

    I noticed that Godot Engine Apple Vision OS support is merged today. <3

    https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628

  2. InfluxDB

    InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

    InfluxDB logo
  3. imgui

    Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies

    Project mention: Ask HN: What are good high information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites) | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-08

    I find the imgui UIs to be very high density (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui and the gallery issues) See for example the tracy profiler: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy. It seems the game dev community has pretty powerful tools to understand and interrogate their work.

  4. Cocos2d

    Cocos2d-x is a suite of open-source, cross-platform, game-development tools utilized by millions of developers across the globe. Its core has evolved to serve as the foundation for Cocos Creator 1.x & 2.x.

  5. 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners

    🎮 A step-by-step guide to implementing SSAO, depth of field, lighting, normal mapping, and more for your 3D game.

    Project mention: 3D Game Shaders for Beginners | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-17
  6. Bullet

    Bullet Physics SDK: real-time collision detection and multi-physics simulation for VR, games, visual effects, robotics, machine learning etc.

    Project mention: When Should I Use WebAssembly? | dev.to | 2025-03-12

    Physics and Game Engines: Implement high performance physics with Wasm-compiled versions of well established engines. For instance, Ammo.js is a Wasm version of the popular bullet physics engine written in C++.

  7. assimp

    The official Open-Asset-Importer-Library Repository. Loads 40+ 3D-file-formats into one unified and clean data structure.

    Project mention: Robust Wavefront OBJ model parsing in C | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-03-03

    Curiously, what people commonly refer to as 'Waterfront OBJ' is merely a tiny subset of that format dealing with polygons.

    The format supports e.g. higher order curves and surfaces and apps like Maya or Rhino3D can read and write OBj files containing such data. [1]

    Writing a parser for the polygon subset also comes with some caveats.

    If your target is a GPU you probably need to care for robust triangulation of n-gons and making per-face-per-vertex data per-vertex on disconnected triangles.

    Vice versa, if you are feeding data to an offline renderer you want to absolutely preserves such information.

    I believe the tobj Rust crate is one of the few OBJ importers that handles all edge cases. [2] If you think it doesn't, let me know and I will fix that.

    This is surprising for people familiar with one but not the other of the requirements of offline- or GPU rendering.

    I.e. if you write an OBJ reader this can become an issue, see e.g. an issue I opened here [3].

    1. https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/obj/

    2. https://docs.rs/tobj/latest/tobj/struct.LoadOptions.html

    3. https://github.com/assimp/assimp/issues/3677

  8. tiled

    Flexible level editor

    Project mention: Ogmo – free, open source, 2D level editor | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-20
  9. SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

    SaaSHub logo
  10. entt

    Gaming meets modern C++ - a fast and reliable entity component system (ECS) and much more

  11. cocos-engine

    Cocos simplifies game creation and distribution with Cocos Creator, a free, open-source, cross-platform game engine. Empowering millions of developers to create high-performance, engaging 2D/3D games and instant web entertainment.

  12. GameNetworkingSockets

    Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption.

    Project mention: Quake 3 Source Code Review: Network Model | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-11-23

    GameNetworkingSockets from Valve. Maybe not middleware enough? You have to implement the serialization and a state update strategy yourself.

    Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption.

    https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets

  13. o3de

    Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is an Apache 2.0-licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers and content creators to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and high-fidelity simulations without any fees or commercial obligations.

    Project mention: Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-02-18

    O3DE came from Amazon Lumberyard which came from CryEngine, so it's quite possibly one of the better looking open source 3D game engines that you can currently get, no strings attached: https://github.com/o3de/o3de

    Sadly, you need to put in a lot of work to get good results out of it (neither of its predecessors had a reputation for being easy to work with) and for whatever reason many studios aren't exactly rushing to invest a bunch of time into it (many just go for Unreal Engine 5, or stick with Unity etc., indies often opt for Godot), so you don't get much past simple example projects. Part of this is probably that it never generated a lot of hype or much of a community around it.

    Godot has a big community around it and is maturing pretty quickly, the early versions were pretty rough when it came to 3D (2.X and 3.X), but it's better now. Not as stable as Unity or Unreal but those have had the advantage of lots of years of work put into them, by more people than Godot has up until now.

    There's also more niche options like Stride (https://www.stride3d.net/) and Flax (https://flaxengine.com/) but they suffer from the same issues as O3DE, even if otherwise are promising.

  14. JoltPhysics

    A multi core friendly rigid body physics and collision detection library. Written in C++. Suitable for games and VR applications. Used by Horizon Forbidden West.

    Project mention: Jolt: Physics and collision detection library, used by Horizon Forbidden West | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-03
  15. Recast/Detour

    Industry-standard navigation-mesh toolset for games

  16. love

    LÖVE is an awesome 2D game framework for Lua.

    Project mention: The Level Design Book | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-29

    Look into learning LÖVE[1] and the Lua[2] programming language

    [1] https://love2d.org/

    [2] https//lua.org

  17. endless-sky

    Space exploration, trading, and combat game.

    Project mention: Endless Sky: Open-Source Space Exploration, Trading, and Combat Game | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-29
  18. Piccolo

    Piccolo (formerly Pilot) – mini game engine for games104

  19. defold

    Defold is a completely free to use game engine for development of desktop, mobile and web games.

    Project mention: Free high-performance cross-platform game engine | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-18
  20. Panda3D

    Powerful, mature open-source cross-platform game engine for Python and C++, developed by Disney and CMU

    Project mention: Redesigning the Reference Component on Gabe the Bear Blog | dev.to | 2025-03-23

    A GitHub repository (like this one)

  21. SHADERed

    Lightweight, cross-platform & full-featured shader IDE

  22. NoahGameFrame

    A fast, scalable, distributed game server engine/framework for C++, include the actor library, network library, can be used as a real time multiplayer game engine ( MMO RPG/MOBA ), which support C#/Lua script/ Unity3d, Cocos2dx and plan to support Unreal.

  23. imgui-node-editor

    Node Editor built using Dear ImGui

  24. ActionRoguelike

    C++ Action Roguelike in Unreal Engine 5.

  25. lumixengine

    3D C++ Game Engine - yet another open source game engine

  26. SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

    SaaSHub logo
NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).

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Index

What are some of the best open-source Game development projects in C++? This list will help you:

# Project Stars
1 Godot 97,797
2 imgui 66,091
3 Cocos2d 18,568
4 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners 18,498
5 Bullet 13,421
6 assimp 12,001
7 tiled 11,767
8 entt 11,140
9 cocos-engine 8,730
10 GameNetworkingSockets 8,705
11 o3de 8,303
12 JoltPhysics 7,969
13 Recast/Detour 7,034
14 love 6,696
15 endless-sky 6,600
16 Piccolo 6,248
17 defold 5,109
18 Panda3D 4,803
19 SHADERed 4,483
20 NoahGameFrame 4,073
21 imgui-node-editor 4,006
22 ActionRoguelike 3,992
23 lumixengine 3,624

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