Ask HN: Best stack to make a 2D game in 2023

• Godot

  2,742 82,940 10.0 C++

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

  

Godot (https://godotengine.org/) has given me the best mix of freedom and helpfulness. I worked in Unity for a few years, which was terrible but popular, and have done a small amount of Unreal Engine work, and have found them to be more "enterprise"-y than I need/want. Godot is FOSS and is a really incredible community. GDScript is pretty cool (if you're familiar or enjoy Python it'll feel pretty normal), but you can use pretty much whatever programming language you like.

• stb

  164 25,008 6.7 C

  stb single-file public domain libraries for C/C++

Godot.

C++ and SDL2 will get you a window, events, sound and other low level stuff, and you can get support for PNGs and fonts easier by including some of nothings/stb libraries[0] (rather than the equivalent SDL libs.) Maybe toss in Lua/LuaJIT for good measure.

But it's better to just pick up Godot and save yourself months of unnecessary effort.

[0]https://github.com/nothings/stb

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• raylib

  399 18,660 9.8 C

  A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming

Raylib (https://www.raylib.com) is a better API than SDL for hobby 2D game development and here's an illustrative example of why: You cannot even draw a circle in SDL.

If straying from native code then CanvasRenderingContext2D in the browser with JS/TS is good too!

• heaps

  21 3,122 9.7 Haxe

  Heaps : Haxe Game Framework

  

I've personally had a very good experience with Haxe and Haxeflixel (https://haxeflixel.com/) although Heaps (https://heaps.io/) seems to be more popular nowadays.

Haxe is very nice as a language, can easily cross-compile to a lot of targets, Haxeflixel is heavily inspired by some Actionscript framework and has a lot of goodies. Maybe Heaps is more mature, up to date and allows for more advanced features.

• flixel

  20 1,887 9.1 Haxe

  Free, cross-platform 2D game engine powered by Haxe and OpenFL

  

I've personally had a very good experience with Haxe and Haxeflixel (https://haxeflixel.com/) although Heaps (https://heaps.io/) seems to be more popular nowadays.

Haxe is very nice as a language, can easily cross-compile to a lot of targets, Haxeflixel is heavily inspired by some Actionscript framework and has a lot of goodies. Maybe Heaps is more mature, up to date and allows for more advanced features.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project