Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines
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…
Tramway SDK is a free, open-source game engine inspired by classic titles like Half-Life and Morrowind. It features open-world streaming support and is optimized for modern hardware while maintaining old-school design… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Hi HN ! This is an open source project I've been working on for a while. It's actually the third breakout-like game I've built. I really like the simplicity of the concept, having just one input (the puck horizontal position) and a simple gameplay that gives a low skill floor. My girlfriend and I played a lot of the excellent LBreakoutHD, an open source breakout game that follows the traditional formula of having multiple lives, scoring points by breaking bricks and catching the good upgrades that spawn randomly and fall down, while avoiding bad upgrades. She liked this game because it is…
2025 · breakout.lecaro.me · its alternatives →
- 2UL
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 →
- 3
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 →
- 4
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 →
- 5
Retro Game Engine for Racket. Contribute to massung/r-cade development by creating an account on GitHub.
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6MM
Fun free no-download game you
2021 · vnav.io · its alternatives →
- 7
Retro RPG Game Maker. Contribute to ericoporto/fgmk development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
I've been spending a lot of my spare time over the last year creating this little racing game. It's built in PICO-8, which is a really fun “fantasy retro console” that's been mentioned on HN several times. The console has strict limits and I wanted to see how far I could push them The source code for the game is over here: https://github.com/maxbize/PICO-8/tree/master/Driftmania. It's a bit of a mess, but I'm happy to answer any questions on it or development of the game. Cheers! EDIT: For those not familiar with PICO-8, there's only a few inputs: arrow…
2024 · frenchie14.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 9
Earlier this year, we released our open-source game engine [0] built with Rust, WebAssembly, and WebGPU. Today, we’re happy to announce the Ambient platform, which brings web deployment, server hosting, and more to the runtime. With Ambient, you can make a game, deploy it to the browser in one command, share your URL and instantly play with others, no downloads or installs needed. Our WASM use is innovative; it is being used as both a sandboxed runtime for user code, and as a way to run the entire Ambient runtime in the browser. This, paired with our ECS data model, enables a highly modular…
2023 · ambient.run · its alternatives →
- 10
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 →
- 11
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 →
- 12
"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 →
- 13
Open source simulation game based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe
2015 · openttd.org · its alternatives →
- 14
Hello Hacker News! I’ve been working on a side project that ports the entire Source Engine to run in the browser using Emscripten. (Yes, the same engine that powered Half-Life 2, Portal, CSGO, and more.) It’s still a work-in-progress some features are missing and the launcher is in development but core engine functionality is up and running. I’d love feedback, ideas, or contributions. If you’re curious, feel free to check it out, star it, or open a pull request! Here's the link to the source code - https://github.com/OrbitaStudios/LambdaComplexSource
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15OM
I’m tired of getting screwed by game backends like Microsoft PlayFab and Unity Gaming Services. To get a simple cross-platform friends system, we’ve bent over backward fighting against their limited APIs to jerry-rig the behavior we need. These backends “solved” their platform’s rigidity by tacking on a clunky scripting layer [1] [3] with a proprietary KV database [2] [4] (look ma, no transactions!). They proceed to claim you can build a LiveOps game on this rubbish without testing, database migrations, monitoring, BI tooling, etc. We got fed up and built an open-source backend engine as an…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 16
A browser-based 2d rpg engine and game editor. Contribute to brad811/dart-rpg development by creating an account on GitHub.
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
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 →
- 18
A cross platform 2D game engine written in C++ for beginners - sdslabs/Rubeus
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
A Rust LightCycle Game. Contribute to Tortured-Metaphor/LightCycle development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
It's my first steam game, I'm very pleased with how it came out. It's the largest person project I've ever made. I'm happy to answer any questions.
2023 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →
- 21
an experimental 2D/3D game engine for the terminal - GitHub - andrewmd5/glyphion: an experimental 2D/3D game engine for the terminal
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
I’m nervous, announcing this, as it isn’t ready to ship out to the general public yet, and I haven’t had any feedback at all from anyone, I’m out on my own here. I think this concept itself is kind of dismissed outright a lot too, and I understand why, I wouldn’t believe me either actually. But, I do believe this is very much worth your time to check out, I am not aware of anything else very much like it. I won’t repeat what is already written on the github README here, but some info: I am a successful semi-retired solo game developer, I have been making my own bespoke game engines since…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
I've spent 30 years making games as both a hobby and profession, working with Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, RPG Maker, Ren'Py, Godot, and many others. A few years ago, I attended a game dev meetup and met dozens of people with incredible passion for making games – but they were struggling because they lacked technical knowledge. That's when I decided to build a tool that anyone could use to create games. I started developing this as a side project, eventually raised ~$100K through crowdfunding in Korea, then secured ~$200K in angel investment. I assembled a team, and we've been building this…
2025 · play-maker.io · its alternatives →
- 24
Hello HN, I'm sharing a little open-source utility I wrote recently. I'm a huge fan of Brendan Gregg's "BPF Performance Tools" book. However, every time I SSH into a fresh server, most of the diagnostic tools aren't installed there and installing them can be really annoying. I decided to use Nix package manager and LLMs to make this process straightforward. My utility first downloads a "toolbox" of Linux utilities (built with Nix), runs Brendan Gregg's famous "60-second Linux analysis" playbook and then summarizes the results with an LLM. So "60-second Linux analysis" now becomes a single…
Mar 2026 · quesma.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 →