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Top 23 Game Engine Open-Source Projects
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Wow, you weren't kidding, I found these before I got bored (they all seem to be LLM-authored from a quick skim):
- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/115280 Implement C# .NET Integration via Headless Glue Bypass (Build 7ae8ec974) by Eliene-byte
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Project mention: strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-02
My take is that GUI frameworks/APIs have abandoned power users.
Yes, there are thing like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this.
Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially for someone who remembers adding a couple of libraries to a Delphi project back in the Office 2000s era and getting full docking, configurable toolbars, etc. with little to no work.
So the easy fallback (especially with the recent proliferation of libraries) is TUI and CLI applications with the layout/docking and tabs provided by the terminal emulator itself or one of tmux/zellij/etc.
I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.
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filament
A powerful open-source UI framework for Laravel • Build and ship apps & admin panels fast with Livewire
In a life of everybody should be the moment, the time to separate from the parents. Laravel's Shroomok reached that stage in 12 months or so. Bottle-neck was the absence of nice admin dashboard focused on text-content edits. I mean, of course, there were solutions, but I didn't feel right about them until the King was found -- Filament!
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BabylonJS
Babylon.js is a powerful, beautiful, simple, and open game and rendering engine packed into a friendly JavaScript framework.
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Project mention: MonoGame: A .NET framework for making cross-platform games | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-03-07
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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.
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Project mention: Modern Front end Complexity: essential or accidental? | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-21
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Project mention: Getting Started with 2D Games Using Pyxel (Part 1): Introduction | dev.to | 2026-01-05
Pyxel is a game engine that makes it easy to handle things like character rendering, movement, and collision detection. It is especially recommended for those who love retro-style games.
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OpenRA
Open Source real-time strategy game engine for early Westwood games such as Command & Conquer: Red Alert written in C# using SDL and OpenGL. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD and Mac OS X.
Project mention: Ask HN: Which Do you know any open source games? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-08-10 -
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Project mention: Show HN: Spark, An advanced 3D Gaussian Splatting renderer for Three.js | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-06-11
BabylonJS and the OP's own Aframe [1] seem to have similar licenses, similar number of Github stars and forks, although Aframe seems newer and more game / VR focused.
How do Babylon, Aframe, Three.js, and PlayCanvas [2] compare from those that have used them?
IIUC, PlayCanvas is the most mature, featureful, and performant, but it's commercial. Babylon is the featureful 3D engine, whereas Three.js is fairly raw. Though it has some nice stuff for animation, textures, etc., you're really building your own kit.
Any good experiences (or bad) with any of these?
[1] https://github.com/aframevr/aframe
[2] https://playcanvas.com/
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Project mention: MonoGame: A .NET framework for making cross-platform games | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-03-07
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Minetest
Luanti (formerly Minetest) is an open source voxel game-creation platform with easy modding and game creation
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Project mention: Show HN: Blank White Cards – Global Drawing Party Game | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-07-24
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Project mention: Android CLI: Build Android apps 3x faster using any agent | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-16
Yeah, I've been using Flutter since December last year and I'm really amazed how good the developer experience is. I kinda regret not picking it up sooner but from what I understand now's a great time too with the roadmap they've planned for this year (videos on YouTube explaining Flutter concepts and decoupling Material and Cupertino).
You can even make 2D games with Flutter with the help of Flame[0] but be wary that pixel art style games are a bit of a hassle due to some bugs in Flutter itself. Otherwise Flutter is a joy to use for its intended purpose, cross-platform apps.
[0] https://flame-engine.org/
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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 and Death Stranding 2.
> Today the options are either free and open source (which can be extremely high quality, like Jolt: https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics)
I did mention this was changing in particular with physics engines. That being said, proprietary dependencies still reign supreme in places like audio engines. Something like OpenAL isn't really a replacement for FMOD or Wwise. I know those off-the-shelf engines roll their own replacements, but then they also roll their own pathfinding and navmesh generation as far as I know.
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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.
Project mention: From LayaAir to Cocos Creator: A Solo Dev's Engine Migration After iOS Builds Kept Crashing | dev.to | 2026-04-19Cocos Creator was the natural alternative:
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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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 7 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Game Engine projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Godot | 112,150 |
| 2 | imgui | 73,701 |
| 3 | bevy | 46,440 |
| 4 | raylib | 33,258 |
| 5 | filament | 31,015 |
| 6 | BabylonJS | 25,601 |
| 7 | libGDX | 25,131 |
| 8 | GDevelop | 23,492 |
| 9 | Cocos2d | 18,998 |
| 10 | A-Frame | 17,548 |
| 11 | pyxel | 17,517 |
| 12 | OpenRA | 16,768 |
| 13 | magictools | 16,767 |
| 14 | engine | 15,945 |
| 15 | openage | 14,239 |
| 16 | MonoGame | 13,976 |
| 17 | Ebiten | 13,208 |
| 18 | Minetest | 12,945 |
| 19 | entt | 12,753 |
| 20 | boardgame.io | 12,311 |
| 21 | flame | 10,608 |
| 22 | JoltPhysics | 10,458 |
| 23 | cocos-engine | 9,630 |
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