Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Carimbo, a 2D game engine written in C++23 using SDL, featuring Lua

A 2D game engine developed in modern C++ using SDL, an Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture, miniaudio, and Box2D. It features Lua scripting and is designed for web portability via WebAssembly - willtobyte/carimbo

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1
I open-sourced my Steam game, 100% written in Lua, engine is also open▲65
Homebrew engine https://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
2
I wrote my own RTS game engine in C▲1,102
An OpenGL RTS game engine written in C. Contribute to eduard-permyakov/permafrost-engine development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
3
Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine▲260
3D C++ Game Engine - yet another open source game engine - nem0/LumixEngine
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
4
A 2D game engine in under 1000 lines of C▲98
A top-down 2d game engine, written from scratch in under 1000 lines of C. Development of the game based on this engine is streamed on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ryanpcmcquen - ryanpcmcquen/basque
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
LuaGB – A Gameboy emulator written in pure Lua▲136
A gameboy emulator written in pure Lua. Work in progress. - zeta0134/LuaGB
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games▲337
I’ve been working on this for about a year through four major rewrites. Godogen is a pipeline that takes a text prompt, designs the architecture, generates 2D/3D assets, writes the GDScript, and tests it visually. The output is a complete, playable Godot 4 project. Getting LLMs to reliably generate functional games required solving three specific engineering bottlenecks: 1. The Training Data Scarcity: LLMs barely know GDScript. It has ~850 classes and a Python-like syntax that will happily let a model hallucinate Python idioms that fail to compile. To fix this, I built a custom…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
7
Tiny – A 2D Game Engine in Kotlin Working with Lua▲100
I created a small 2D game engine named Tiny. The engine was created using Kotlin Multiplatform and can run on a JVM and JS. Funny things: Games can be created using the programming language Lua. Tiny is designed to help you create and test your ideas quickly and effectively. Not only can you run your games on your desktop computer, but you can also export them for the web, making it easy to share your creations with others. You can create games easily with the hot reload, small API and Lua, which is very easy to learn. If you want to test a game idea, to try to create your first game or just…
2023 · minigdx.github.io · its alternatives →
8H0
Hypatia 0.2, a 2D adventure game engine▲191
Hello, Hacker News! My name is Lillian (see: http://about.lillian.link/), and I just released version 0.2 of my MIT-licensed game engine, Hypatia(http://lillian-lemmer.github.io/hypatia/). Hypatia is a game engine for single player 2D action adventure games. You can use it to make a game like Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Hypatia is aimed at non-programmers and programmers alike. I'm seeking any sort of feedback. Hypatia supports FreeBSD first, but has great support for just about any platform…
2015 · its alternatives →
9MP
My platforming game written in C 89▲127
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
10
I open sourced a game I just released on Steam, written in Lua▲496
A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
2D Game engine and editor for Windows and Linux▲121
Hello HN, Just wanted to show this little 2D game engine that I've been working on for some time (around 2 years on the editor part, longer on some of the components). It's quite full featured but obviously this a project of such magnitude already that the work never really ends. That being said it's definitely already at a point where games can made and published. The editor runs natively on Windows and Linux using Qt5. The games can run on both Win and Linux as well as on WASM with WebGL. Feature wise there's a bunch of the stuff you'd expect. Audio, graphics, scripting,…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
12
Toy – A thin C++ game engine▲180
toy is a thin and modular c++ game engine that also runs on the web.
2018 · hugoam.github.io · its alternatives →
13
A new hobby OS from “scratch” in C#▲310
A multitasking monolithic Kernel based x86 targeting Operating System written in C# from scratch aiming for high-level implementation of drivers in managed environment. - amaneureka/AtomOS
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
Crown – A flexible game engine written from scratch in C++▲193
Crown Engine. Contribute to dbartolini/crown development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
E3Dos – A 3D engine I wrote when I was a teen▲83
A 3D Engine I wrote as a kid in C++. Contribute to vladaionescu/E3Dos development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
I made a 2D Lua game engine using Rust with code and asset live reload▲30
I love making small 2D pixel art games, especially using tools that have some constraints. Things like Pico-8 and the Playdate SDK are simple, fun, and allow for focusing on the game idea rather than the technical minutia. Years ago I prototyped an idea for this little game engine, Usagi, but used Rhai instead of Lua. The idea for this little game engine never went away, so I decided to finally dig in and build it. Today I released v1.0.0 of Usagi Engine after making a bunch of small games, getting feedback from developers, and stabilizing the API. It's simple, has a great developer…
May 2026 · usagiengine.com · its alternatives →
17CP
ClojureScript pixel game engine with Blender live-reloading▲285
Hi HN! 2d spritesheets for game development are often distributed as a PNG image, sometimes with a separate JSON or XML metadata document describing the layout, including any animation sequences within the sheet. Sometimes there is no metadata document and you have to work it out and manually write custom code to chop up the spritesheet and reference the sprites you want. I think it would be good if it became standard practice to distribute spritesheet PNGs with the metadata inline inside a PNG "chunk" so the whole thing is self-contained. That way artists can just distribute one file, and…
2019 · mccormick.cx · its alternatives →
18
Cross-platform 2D game engine for beginners written in C++▲8
A cross platform 2D game engine written in C++ for beginners - sdslabs/Rubeus
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
A Modern C/C++ build tools (Simple, Fast, Cross-platform)▲89
A cross-platform build utility based on Lua
2019 · xmake.io · its alternatives →
20
Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)▲85
Hey folks — here’s a small experiment I hacked together over the weekend: https://cleoselene.com/ In short, it’s a way to build multiplayer games with no client-side game logic. Everything is rendered on the server, and the game itself is written as simple Lua scripts. I built this to explore a few gamedev ideas I’ve been thinking about while working on Abstra: - Writing multiplayer games as if they were single-player (no client/server complexity) - Streaming game primitives instead of pixels, which should be much lighter - Server-side rendering makes cheating basically…
Jan 2026 · cleoselene.com · its alternatives →
21SF
Self-Funded Game with Homemade Engine – Play Online, Steam Coming▲23
Hi HN! I’ve been building a 2D game using a custom engine I wrote from scratch – no Unity, no frameworks. It’s fully self-funded and will be released commercially on Steam. Engine source code (MIT): http://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo I’d love feedback on the gameplay, visuals, performance, or anything else. Thanks!
2025 · bereprobate.com · its alternatives →
22
A console-based editor with Lua support, based on antirez's project▲85
A minimal text-editor with lua scripting. Contribute to skx/kilua development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
I built a small browser engine from scratch in C++▲146
Hi HN! Korean high school senior here, about to start CS in college. I built a browser engine from scratch in C++ to understand how browsers work. First time using C++, 8 weeks of development, lots of debugging—but it works! Features: - HTML parsing with error correction - CSS cascade and inheritance - Block/inline layout engine - Async image loading + caching - Link navigation + history Hardest parts: - String parsing(html, css) - Rendering - Image Caching & Layout Reflowing What I learned (beyond code): - Systematic debugging is crucial - Ship with known bugs rather than chase…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
24
C# Game Engine with its own scripting language and IDE▲118
GitHub repo: https://github.com/ArcadeMakerSources/ArcadeMaker (first of all, i want to say that I made this project for fun and challenge. I always wanted to create my own language. This has no business goal or something.) So the project is a 2D game engine (MonoGame backend) inspired by GameMaker 8. It includes its own IDE (built with WinForms) and an interpreted programming language that I wrote myself. The language—definitely the biggest challenge in the project—is a simple dynamically typed language. When I started, I had zero knowledge of how to build something like…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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