Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?

• lovr

  35 1,651 9.7 C

  Lua Virtual Reality Framework

I haven't used many engines, but I've been programming some simple games with LÖVE [0] and (to a lesser extent) LÖVR [1] and like them both.

But maybe not real game engines, as you need to do quite a bit of work by yourself. I guess it depends what your definition is of a game engine.

---

[0]: https://love2d.org

[1]: https://lovr.org

• love

  258 4,378 9.7 C++

  LÖVE is an awesome 2D game framework for Lua.

  

I haven't used many engines, but I've been programming some simple games with LÖVE [0] and (to a lesser extent) LÖVR [1] and like them both.

But maybe not real game engines, as you need to do quite a bit of work by yourself. I guess it depends what your definition is of a game engine.

---

[0]: https://love2d.org

[1]: https://lovr.org

• 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.

  

• blitz3d

  1 234 10.0 HTML

My fav from years ago, was ye ol' Blitz3D:

https://github.com/blitz-research/blitz3d

I've always wanted to try Haxe, because of my Flash background: https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/

• dragon-game

  2 0 10.0 Ruby

  2D shooter game written in Ruby. (by ritog)

I am not primarily a game developer. But I wanted to see how some of it works.

The engine that has been instrumental to it is DragonRuby Game Toolkit [0]. It was easy to set up and use. And I developed a simple game [1] following a really accessible book [2].

It uses Ruby which is an easy language to pick up- especially as someone who is experienced in Python.

I really loved the experience and talked with the author to turn the book into a livecoding tutorial series.

[0]: https://dragonruby.org/toolkit/game

[1]: https://github.com/ritog/dragon-game

[1a]: https://ritog.itch.io/silly-dragon-target-game

[2]: https://dragonridersunite.itch.io/dragonruby-book

• AUXL

  7 13 8.9 JavaScript

  A-Frame UX Library : A Web XR System, Support Components, World Maps, Object Generators, Universal Controller & Interactive Powers.

I tried a bunch of the popular game engines and none of them really clicked for me. It wasn't until I found A-Frame and Three.js (which isn't an engine at all, but a Web 3D XR VR AR Renderer) that had an Entity-Component Architecture with a foss eco system of components that you could mix and match then things started making more sense.

So did I cleverly use all these freely built components to make the greatest XR experience ever? Nah, I decided to re-invent the wheel and do everything myself :). I do enjoy the challenge and freedom to build my own ultimate tool though and I know it's not likely others will use it, but I did release it under GPL3 anyways. It has a wiki (slightly outdated atm :)), starter script and some examples too.

It's pretty fun as both a learning/practice experience and actually be able to use it for various builds. Makes it even easier to prototype XR ideas which I love. I am currently wrapping v0.3 which has added tons of improvements, although it's not exactly ready for release, if anyone feels like checking it out I added some links as ref...

AUXL (A-Frame UX Library) v0.3 repo --> https://github.com/Minty-Crisp/AUXL

• Obsidian

  12 144 0.0 Lua

  A community continuation of the OBLIGE Level Maker, originally by Andrew Apted, combined with ObAddon. (by obsidian-level-maker)

  

A search for "GZDoom" on Steam will show some different indie games that are using the engine, there are a few interesting ones.

A cursory youtube search brought up this random video with a wide variety of examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjnOdDzSxWs

There are also several versions of random level generators for Doom engine maps out there: https://obsidian-level-maker.github.io/

I can't remember the names but there are mods and games out there integrating the random level generators.

Of course the maps are still BSP and therefore somewhat constrained but the level of creativity in the mod community is pretty amazing.

• Pygame

  148 6,937 9.1 C

  🐍🎮 pygame (the library) is a Free and Open Source python programming language library for making multimedia applications like games built on top of the excellent SDL library. C, Python, Native, OpenGL.

  

• 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.

  

• GDevelop

  147 5,713 9.8 JavaScript

  :video_game: Open-source, cross-platform game engine designed to be used by everyone.

I'm not really a game maker, but would like to give a shout out to the fabulous https://gdevelop.io/

It has everything you need, is free and its VISUAL PROGRAMMING is fab...

• upbge

  27 1,343 10.0 C++

  UPBGE, the best integrated game engine in Blender

  

Suggest a related project