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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Tiny – A 2D Game Engine in Kotlin Working with Lua

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…

Tiny is a 2D game engine built with Kotlin Multiplatform that runs on JVM and JavaScript. Games are written in Lua, a lightweight scripting language. The engine emphasizes rapid development through hot reload… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Tiny – A 2D Game Engine in Kotlin Working with Lua launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

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    Tiny API▲538

    Enabling developers to monetise their code

    2023 · tinyapi.co · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    A lightweight programming language built with Go. Contribute to confh/Tiny development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    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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    As part of the annual JS13K games challenge, I've put together a pretty large (but small-in-code) Metroidvania game that fits in just 13KB of compressed Javascript. The source is available here: https://github.com/arikwex/infernal-sigil NOTE: the current head of the main branch is at 13.6KB due to quality of life patches. The legit 13KB version is tagged in github. Useful hacks: - Using Roadroller (https://github.com/lifthrasiir/roadroller) for compression - Compressing the map data as grayscale PNG paired with some code generation. - Using procedural…

    2022 · arineonshark.itch.io · its alternatives →

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    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 →

  6. 6
    tinykiwi▲406

    Simple yet powerful image editor, tailor-made for makers

    2022 · its alternatives →

  7. 7CP

    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 →

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    Repo here: https://github.com/ariroffe/personal-website

    2022 · arielroffe.quest · its alternatives →

  9. 9H0

    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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    TinyCity is a city simulation game inspired by SimCity for MicroPython - chrisdiana/TinyCity

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Handy developer tools with a delightful interface

    2021 · smalldev.tools · its alternatives →

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    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 →

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    Click and build tiny worlds

    May 2026 · tinyworld.build · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Go compiler for small places. Microcontrollers, WebAssembly (WASM/WASI), and command-line tools. Based on LLVM. - tinygo-org/tinygo

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15OP

    Hey HN, manyminiapps is the world first massively multiplayer online mini app builder (MMOMA) *Here’s what it does:* You load the page. You write 1 prompt and you get a mini app back in under 2 minutes. There’s no sign up, and you can see what everyone’s creating in real-time! Each mini app comes with it’s own database and backend, so you can build shareable apps that save data. *What’s different* There are a lot of app builders that promise you’ll build production software for others. But we think true production software can take a long time to get right. Even if you don’t need to program…

    2025 · manyminiapps.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Show HN: TinyWasm - A tiny WebAssembly Runtime written in Rust Hi HN! I'm excited to share TinyWasm (https://github.com/explodingcamera/tinywasm), a WebAssembly Interpreter I developed for my final university project. The main goal of this project was to deepen my understanding of WebAssembly and interpreter design. TinyWasm successfully passes all the official WebAssembly 1.0 tests and also includes features from future proposals such as like bulk memory operations. Initially more of a research project, TinyWasm focuses on simplicity and portability. It has minimal…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    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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    tiny playstationy renderer. Contribute to nkanaev/tipsy development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20TL
  21. 21
    TinyJS▲14

    A tiny JavaScript library for creating HTML elements

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22TG

    You tap icons to create a wireframe, or do some visual brainstorming. Then export the image to share on Slack, Gitlab, etc. I wanted to work on neural net that interprets an imported image of a wireframe, to then manipulate it inside an app. Figured it would be best to first build the wireframing app. So I created TinyUX. It's released as quickly as possible this influenced some choices: - While created in React Native, it's Android only. - It's paid only (~$5). While freemium might make more sense, this was quicker to release, since in-app-purchases in RN is not trivial. First app I created…

    2022 · tinyux.app · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Smart Lottie optimization for high-performance SaaS.

    May 2026 · tinylottie.com · its alternatives →

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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 →