Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I made a 2D Lua game engine using Rust with code and asset live reload
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…
Usagi Engine is a 2D game engine built in Rust that uses Lua for scripting and supports live reload of code and assets. Designed for pixel art game developers, it emphasizes simplicity and developer experience through… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
- 3IM
Hi HN! I made many small web games in the past with Unity or Phaser. But this time I wanted to make something completely on my own. So I coded a basic game framework in plain JavaScript, and used it to make Almost Pong. This was a really fun project that taught me a lot about JavaScript, and I plan to make more minimalist games with this framework. Interesting fact: Almost Pong doesn't load any assets, all sprites and sounds are generated with code. Happy to answer questions, and please let me know if you have any feedback on the game. Thanks!
2022 · lessmilk.com · its alternatives →
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It's been closed source for a long time while I worked on it on and off as a hobby research project, but yesterday the repo was made public for the first time under the MPL 2.0 license. A feature reel showing its capabilities can be found here: https://ktstephano.github.io/rendering/stratusgfx/feature_re... A technical breakdown of a single frame can be found here: https://ktstephano.github.io/rendering/stratusgfx/frame_anal... It's still in a very beta state (bugs and instability expected), but I felt like it was a good time to make it…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5IB
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 →
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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 →
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I've been building a modern Ultima Online server emulator from scratch. It's not feature-complete (no combat, no skills yet), but the foundation is solid and I wanted to share it early. What it does today: - Full packet layer for the classic UO client (login, movement, items, mobiles) - Lua scripting for item behaviors (double-click a potion, open a door — all defined in Lua, no C# recompile) - Spatial world partitioned into sectors with delta sync (only sends packets for new sectors when crossing boundaries) - Snapshot-based persistence with MessagePack - Source generators for automatic DI…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…
2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
- 10CP
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 →
- 11AR
My background project for the last two years has been re-implementing my 2004 C++ shoot'em up game in TypeScript + WebGL, and it's finally done (just in time for the 20th anniversary!) Play the game online: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/darklaga.html Technical article about the remake: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/remake.html I have tested Firefox, Chrome and Edge on desktop and mobile (no access to a device capable of running Safari). It's amazing how much difference 20 years makes: the hardware is so much more powerful, the web…
2024 · nicollet.net · its alternatives →
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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 →
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So, after years of abandoning Rust after the hello world stage, I finally decided to do something substantial. It started with simple line rendering, but I liked how it was progressing so I figured I could make a reasonably complete PSX style renderer and a game with it. My only dependency is SDL2; I treat it as my "platform", so it handles windowing, input and audio. This means my Cargo.toml is as simple as: [dependencies.sdl2] version = "0.35" default-features = false features = ["mixer"] this pulls around 6-7 other dependencies. I am doing actual true color 3D rendering (with Z buffer,…
2025 · totenarctanz.itch.io · its alternatives →
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3D C++ Game Engine - yet another open source game engine - nem0/LumixEngine
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15H0
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 →
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A liminal brush-based CSG editor and game engine with unified (forward) renderer inspired by Radiant and Worldcraft/Hammer Compact and lightweight (target: Snapdragon 8CX, OpenGL 3.3) Real-time lighting with stencil shadows without the need for pre-baked compilation
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17IM
I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…
2022 · battle-of-flags.com · its alternatives →
- 18
I'm excited to announce the first release of my library, evolved.lua! evolved.lua is a fast and flexible ECS (Entity-Component-System) library for Lua. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, while providing all the features needed to create complex systems with blazing performance. Enjoy!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Retro Game Engine for Racket. Contribute to massung/r-cade development by creating an account on GitHub.
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
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 →
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"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 →
- 22
A minimal text-editor with lua scripting. Contribute to skx/kilua development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Lua Text Adventure Engine. Contribute to shawndumas/adventure.lua development by creating an account on GitHub.
2012 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi HN, Founder here. We built Pica, an open-source platform in Rust to enable agentic AI with three main focus areas: - Access to APIs and tools: Universal SDKs that let AI agents use thousands of external actions without blowing up your context window. - Visibility and traceability: Full audit logs of every decision/action to ensure transparency and accountability. - Alignment with human intentions: Seamless guardrails for autonomous tasks; e.g., restricting certain email actions to human approval. Why this matters: As autonomy in AI grows, we need robust solutions for trust and…
2025 · picaos.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I open sourced a game I just released on Steam, written in Lua alternatives
- Tiny – A 2D Game Engine in Kotlin Working with Lua alternatives
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- 2D Game engine and editor for Windows and Linux 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 →