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

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com
#Game Engine #Game development #Gamedev #HacktoberFest #Miscellaneous

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  • Godot

    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

    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

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  • raylib

    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

    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

    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.

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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