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I have used love2d for a lot of small projects and highly regard it (and absolutely LOVE its community. Personally love2d & Rust have been the most helpful comm
by rishav_sharan 3y ago
I have used love2d for a lot of small projects and highly regard it (and absolutely LOVE its community. Personally love2d & Rust have been the most helpful communities I have ever interacted with). But it is NOT a unity replacement. Not even for 2d.
Its a framework and not an engine. which means that you have a core engine and there are some community libraries in various states of completion/support that you can use. Else you end up doing everything by yourself.
Let's say, you want to do UI, then there are 4-5 options ahead of you and you will no know how well these libraries are maintained till you use them. Very likely you wil find yourself mucking about the code of these libraries to fix weird bugs or adding a feature your game needs.
So, great for prototyping and learning about game dev. But not something I recommend for actual projects with dates.
Overall IMO, the closest to Unity alternative I can recommend are;
1. Godot
2. Defold
3. Gdevelop (HTML based. No-code development, which can make people love or hate it)
4. CTjs
If you are ok with paying for the gamedev - Gamemaker is another solid choice.
Each of these have their pros and cans, but are full fledged engines with huge communities and helpful resources to go with them.
And if an editor free engine is what you are looking for , Raylib would be highly recommended.
My personal requirements would be;
* 2d focused
* huge community with tutorials & documentation for everything
* libraries & extensions for all the usual gamedev stuff like camera, lighting etc.
* asset protection baked in
* console & mobile export targets.
* Steam integration
Personally, I am personally leaning heavily towards Raylib using zig bindings - with Gdevelop/CTjs for quick prototyping of ideas.
I have tried Rust engines like Bevy, but the Rust tax was too heavy for me and I personally could not proceed beyond simple projects. your mileage may vary. Fyrox is good too, but there are pretty much no tutorials out there.
Another dark horse you can consider is the Flame engine on Flutter. Its very feature complete and you get all the mobile niceties for free. it has a nice community but examples, documentation tutorials etc are non existent.
Finally, if wishes come true, i'd really like a native version of the Phaser engine which will allow me to code in typescript, have all the existing Phaser features/apis, let me leverage its huge tutorials/resources, generate native binaries, enable baking in assets etc- but we don't have anything like that yet -_-
- pjmlp 3y agoFrom my point of view, all the engines that don't have C# as the main programming language are already out from the "Unity like" pool, followed by not having console support, VR/AR headsets, and being supported in all major industry SDKs.
- jmiskovic 3y agoYeah, and engine's name should be Unity, just to be safe. Why not just stick to Unity instead of playing no true Scotsman? Not even Unreal satisfies these.
- pjmlp 3y agoThat is exactly the problem, Unity knowns that there isn't any good alternative. Sure, there is Monogame, Silk.NET, Stride, however they don't tick all the boxes that Unity offers.
- MassiveBonk51 3y agoIs c# support a deal breaker? I'm not a game dev so I don't really know if there's any games dev specific tooling for c# that people rely on.
- pjmlp 3y agoDefinitly, that is the biggest selling point for Unity, it is a C# based game engine, with a C++ core like most engines, however what everyone writes is C#, with Burst (a C# subset for C++ like programming) they were even in the process of rewriting parts of the C++ core in C#. So any engine whose game code isn't C# is a deal break for existing Unity users, as the only thing remaining are the assets.
- JuanPosadas 3y agoI don't think gamedevs specifically care about C#, it's more like "not c++" but also not as slow as other popular languages.
- 3y ago