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24 alternatives to I wrote my own RTS game engine in C

An OpenGL RTS game engine written in C. Contribute to eduard-permyakov/permafrost-engine development by creating an account on GitHub.

This is a custom-built real-time strategy game engine written in C, created by an individual developer and shared on GitHub. It's designed for anyone interested in game development, strategy games, or learning how RTS… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I wrote my own RTS game engine in C launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    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 →

  2. 2

    An OpenGL RTS game engine written in C. Contribute to eduard-permyakov/permafrost-engine development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Crown Engine. Contribute to dbartolini/crown development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    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 →

  5. 5MP

    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 →

  6. 6

    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 →

  7. 7IM

    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 →

  8. 8

    "interesting" VM in C. Let's see how this goes. Contribute to tekknolagi/carp development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    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 →

  10. 10

    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 →

  11. 11

    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. 12

    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 →

  13. 13

    3D C++ Game Engine - yet another open source game engine - nem0/LumixEngine

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    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 →

  15. 15

    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 →

  16. 16

    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 →

  17. 17
    Mirage▲278

    Where you co-create the game as you play it

    2025 · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Programming language that compiles into a x86 ELF executable. - riicchhaarrd/ocean

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19
    Nitrode ▲318

    AI game engine to prototype 3D games in a day

    2025 · nitrode.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    toy is a thin and modular c++ game engine that also runs on the web.

    2018 · hugoam.github.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Been making this rasterizer engine in C++ for the past few months, now also adding ray-tracing functionality to the system. Simply load a model or generate a mesh, add some lights, and render.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Real Time Strategy. Contribute to emnh/rts development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23GD
  24. 24

    I love C and C++, but setting up projects can sometimes be a pain. Every time I wanted to start something new I'd spend the first hour writing CMakeLists.txt, figuring out find_package, copying boilerplate from my last project, and googling why my library isn't linking. By the time the project was actually set up I'd lost all momentum. So, I built Craft - a lightweight build and workflow tool for C and C++. Instead of writing CMake, your project configuration goes in a simple craft.toml: [project] name = "my_app" version = "0.1.0" language = "c" c_standard = 99 [build] type = "executable"…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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