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…
I made a 2D Lua game engine using Rust with code and asset live reload launched on May 19, 2026 with 30 votes, #828 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
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 a CLI-based workflow, project templates, and single-command cross-platform export to web, Linux, macOS, and Windows. The engine is public domain and available on GitHub, making it accessible for hobbyists and indie developers who want to focus on game ideas rather than technical complexity.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Usagi is a free and open source game engine for making pixel art games coded with Lua. It features live reloading of code and assets during development and cross-platform export in a single command.
Usagi is a 2D game engine for making pixel art games in Lua 5.5. It features live reload, single-command cross-platform export, and a pause menu with input remapping built in. Usagi is free software made by Brett Chalupa and dedicated to the public domain. Support development of the engine by buying me a coffee. Links: usagiengine.com , Book , Discord , r/UsagiEngine , Quickstart video , YouTube Playlist curl -fsSL https://usagiengine.com/install.sh | sh Windows (PowerShell): irm https://usagiengine.com/install.ps1 | iex The installer fetches the latest release, verifies its SHA-256 checksum, installs usagi to ~/.usagi/bin/ (or %USERPROFILE%\.usagi\bin\ on Windows), and adds it to PATH .…from usagiengine.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
I open sourced a game I just released on Steam, written in Lua2021 · github.com · ▲496A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
Tiny – A 2D Game Engine in Kotlin Working with Lua2023 · minigdx.github.io · ▲100I 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…
StratusGFX, my open-source real-time 3D rendering engine2023 · github.com · ▲483It'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…
- IBI built an indie, browser-based MMORPG2024 · alpha.reconquer.online · ▲340
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…
2D Game engine and editor for Windows and Linux2022 · github.com · ▲121Hello 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,…
Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scriptingMar 2026 · github.com · ▲287I'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…
More dev tools this month
the category →
open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 27d ago · github.com
Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 25d ago · github.com
OpenBot▲362Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer
Dev tools · 22d ago · openbot.run
Talanoa▲340Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…
Dev tools · 20d ago · talanoa.email
CoreSpeed▲332One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools
Dev tools · 27d ago · corespeed.io
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, May 2026
the whole month →
Parallel agents, diff reviewer, and multi-model comparisons
Dev tools · May 2026 · kilo.ai
Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
Life & fun · May 2026 · github.com
🌱 Private, quiet space for thinking. Simple app for .md files. - zakirullin/files.md
Dev tools · May 2026 · github.com