Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I open-sourced my Steam game, 100% written in Lua, engine is also open
Homebrew engine https://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo
Carimbo is an open-source game engine and a completed Steam game, both entirely written in Lua. It is designed for developers interested in exploring a homebrew engine implementation or learning from a full game… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
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
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
3D C++ Game Engine - yet another open source game engine - nem0/LumixEngine
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4SF
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 →
- 5
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 →
- 6OS
Hello! This is Jeane and Samuel and we’re building RecipeUI. RecipeUI is an open source Postman alternative that uses TypeScript to statically type and autocomplete requests. We built this because current API tools don’t deal with the fact that some APIs are just painful to work with. For us, it’s usually error after error as we try to figure out how to properly form the first request. We recorded a demo to show you how TypeScript helps us autocomplete a request correctly. https://youtu.be/O_Mly_p-g5s How does our platform improve the developer experience? The analogy is…
2023 · recipeui.com · its alternatives →
- 7
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 →
- 8
A gameboy emulator written in pure Lua. Work in progress. - zeta0134/LuaGB
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
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 →
- 10H0
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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🍃 Learn to code by making games in a JavaScript web-based game editor. - hackclub/sprig
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Crown Engine. Contribute to dbartolini/crown development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
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 →
- 14
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 →
- 15
OpenUI▲322Thesys just open-sourced their generative UI rendering engine. Interesting timing given where Google a2ui and Vercel's json-render are headed. The difference worth noting: a2ui and json-render both treat JSONL as the contract between the LLM and the renderer. Thesys is betting that's the wrong primitive. Their engine uses a code-like syntax (OpenUI Lang) instead — LLM writes it, renderer executes it. The argument is that LLMs are fundamentally better at generating code than generating structured data, so you get cleaner output and ~67% fewer tokens. The broader vision seems to be a…
Mar 2026 · openui.com · its alternatives →
- 16
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 →
- 17
minimal carball on linux. fun for humans and ai! Contribute to moritztng/hacker-league development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
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 →
- 19
So just for fun, I wrote a complete multiplayer game in pure C++. I even wrote my own texture atlas packer, which is now used by Assassin's Creed, 2 scientific publications as well as a drone manufacturing company - each of these basically mentions the name of my game. There is even a claim that Unity patented some of the ECS ideas that originate from this project. See https://github.com/TeamHypersomnia/Hypersomnia#tech-highligh... for details. By the way the game is pretty darn good. 10 people connected yesterday to test a new map:…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Friendly Fire is a dialog-driven indie pixel platformer with metroidvania elements originally developed as a team effort for the game jam Ludum Dare #46 within three days. It is free to play an can be accessed via steam or browser.
2020 · friendlyfiregame.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Retro RPG Game Maker. Contribute to ericoporto/fgmk development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Lua Text Adventure Engine. Contribute to shawndumas/adventure.lua development by creating an account on GitHub.
2012 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
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 →
- 24IJ
2011 · codebrief.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Carimbo, a 2D game engine written in C++23 using SDL, featuring Lua alternatives
- Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine alternatives
- I open sourced a game I just released on Steam, written in Lua alternatives
- Self-Funded Game with Homemade Engine – Play Online, Steam Coming alternatives
- I wrote my own RTS game engine in C alternatives
- Open-source Postman alternative with type safety alternatives
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