Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Cross-platform 2D game engine for beginners written in C++
A cross platform 2D game engine written in C++ for beginners - sdslabs/Rubeus
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Cross-platform 2D game engine for beginners written in C++ launched in 2018; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
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 →
- 2
Crown Engine. Contribute to dbartolini/crown development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
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 →
- 4MP
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 →
- 5
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 →
- 6TS
Hello everyone, I would like to see if there is any interest in this little project that I have been working on for the past few years. Could be relevant, seeing the direction in which the mainstream game engines are going. I didn't really like any of the already existing options, so I tried to make my own and it turned out to be easier than expected. It's sort of like a low-budget Unreal/Source, but with open-world streaming support and it is free and open source. Very old-school. But optimized for more modern hardware. Very fast too. Still not production ready, but it seems like it is…
2025 · racenis.github.io · its alternatives →
- 7
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 →
- 8
3D C++ Game Engine - yet another open source game engine - nem0/LumixEngine
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
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 →
- 10UL
In the wake of all the Unity nonsense, just wanted to toss the Raverie engine into this mix :) We’re building off a previous engine that we worked on for DigiPen Institute of Technology called the Zero Engine with a similar component based design architecture to Unity. Our engine had a unique feature called Spaces: separate worlds/levels that you can instantiate and run at the same time, which became super useful for creating UI overlays using only game objects, running multiple simulations, etc. The lighting and rendering engine is scriptable, and the default deferred rendering…
2023 · raverie-us.github.io · its alternatives →
- 11
Modd.io is a collaborative game editor that runs in browser. It's kind of like Figma for game dev. We made this engine low-code and multiplayer-first, so developeres can quickly prototype casual multiplayer games. I hope some of you guys will find this useful. Would love to hear feedback also. Thank you. Engine Demo: https://www.modd.io
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
toy is a thin and modular c++ game engine that also runs on the web.
2018 · hugoam.github.io · its alternatives →
- 13
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 →
- 14H0
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 →
- 15IB
I've been working on an MMORPG that is now in alpha as a solo developer. Here are the major open source technologies that I use: Blender - 3D modeling software for creating the overall environment and every game object. I've gotten a lot of CC and Public Domain assets from https://poly.pizza GLTF - I export assets from blender to the GLTF asset format JSON - I write a JSON config for every game object that describes things like its name, its interactions, its collisions, etc. Node.js exporter - I iterate over the environment and every asset to create a scene hierarchy. I use…
2024 · alpha.reconquer.online · its alternatives →
- 16CP
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 →
- 17
I'm making a platform for simple open source games you can play anywhere. Games are all just JavaScript classes and you can read the source of every game on the platform. I started working on initial "games" (mostly rendering tests) in 2018 and eventually built all of the platform stuff around it to make it easy to share games. There's also an in-browser editor available for you to make and publish games all from the browser. Would love some feedback on the games and studio features as well as the platform overall. All of the code is available at https://github.com/homegamesio
Jul 2026 · homegames.io · its alternatives →
- 18
An OpenGL RTS game engine written in C. Contribute to eduard-permyakov/permafrost-engine development by creating an account on GitHub.
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
An intuitive and beginner friendly 2D game framework for C++ - Madour/NasNas
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Drogon: A C++14/17/20 based HTTP web application framework running on Linux/macOS/Unix/Windows - drogonframework/drogon
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
C++ Path Tracer from scratch with zero third-party libraries. - themartiano/luz
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
"Game" is a stretch, but I put together this repo containing a pure Rust app which uses SDL2 and compiles to WASM (and can be run in a browser). Older resources were a bit out of date and a bit too verbose for my purposes, so here's a minimal working example.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
An object oriented 2D game-engine in Clojure. Contribute to divs1210/bakait development by creating an account on GitHub.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Cinder▲122Free and open source library for creative coding in C++
2017 · libcinder.org · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I wrote my own RTS game engine in C alternatives
- Crown – A flexible game engine written from scratch in C++ alternatives
- A 2D game engine in under 1000 lines of C alternatives
- My platforming game written in C 89 alternatives
- 2D Game engine and editor for Windows and Linux alternatives
- Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →