At Beamable, we are committed to helping game makers achieve their creative ambitions and rapidly add the features and content to their games that will help them be commercially successful. We aren’t the only ones with that mission. There is an entire universe of committed game engine and tool developers waking up every day to make it easier to create games. Here is an alphabetical list of game engines to help you find the right one to build your dream.
This is not an exhaustive list. If you have a game engine that you know is missing, please put it in the comments or contact us about it and we will have it added to this list!
Updated: May 2021
AppGameKit is an easy to learn game development engine, ideal for Beginners, Hobbyists & Indie developers. Now anyone can quickly code and build apps for multiple platforms using AppGameKit – have your demos and games up and running on mobile devices
Babylon’s mission is to create one of the most powerful, beautiful, and simple Web rendering engines in the world. Their passion is to make it completely open and free for everyone.
No-Code mobile game development. For Free. The power to design, build, and publish 3D & 2D
mobile games without coding.
Cocos Creator is a script development, entity-component, and data-driven game development tool focused on content creation. It comes with an easy-to-follow content production workflow and a powerful suite of developer tools for game logic and high-performance game creation.
Construct is a world-class game development toolkit with some of the easiest and most powerful tools right at your fingertips.
Corona is a cross-platform framework ideal for rapidly creating apps and games for mobile devices and desktop systems. That means you can create your project once and publish it to multiple types of devices, including Apple iPhone and iPad, Android phones and tablets, Amazon Fire, Mac Desktop, Windows Desktop, and even connected TVs such as Apple TV, Fire TV, and Android TV.
Crafty is a small, simple, and lightweight game engine that can greatly help you build prototypal or fully-featured 2D HTML5 games. Crafty is also open-source and completely free. Its code is hosted openly on GitHub.com and is distributed under the MIT or GPL license.
A powerful AAA game development platform for you and your team to create world-class entertainment experiences.
With Fusion 2.5’s amazing event editor system, you are able to quickly generate games or apps. Within your first hour, you will have learned the basics of the tool. Compile a windows app with a mouse click, Or target additional platforms like iOS, Android, Flash, and XNA (Windows Mobile phone and Xbox) with the purchase of our optional exporters.
Fancade is the Fanmade Arcade! Play thousands of games, or make your own, right on your phone.
Felgo is a cross-platform application development SDK, based on the QT framework and greatly extending it. With Felgo, you can create modern, flexible & beautiful apps, compiled natively from a single code-base. Speed up your development with hot reload and more cutting-edge tooling for all supported platforms. Save up to 90% code with true cross-platform components, service integrations, and native UI/UX out-of-the-box.
The FlatRedBall game engine is cross-platform, focused on 2D game development, and proven across multiple shipped game projects. It’s a perfect choice for small indies or large teams.
Visual game creator, right in your browser! No coding needed – Export apps for iOS, Android & Windows.
What if learning how to make a game was as enjoyable as playing one? It is! Creating in Gamefroot uses a no-code HTML5 interface based on real game industry practice.
Making game development accessible to everyone means taking away the barriers to getting started. Using the intuitive ‘Drag and Drop’ development environment you can have your game up and running in a matter of minutes without ever having to write any code! GameMaker’s built-in language (GML) helps you learn to program as you go and not jump in at the deep end of coding.
GameSalad is a game development platform that allows anyone to create the game of their dreams with a sophisticated visual programming interface. It’s also the best way to introduce programming concepts, game design, and digital media creation to your students.
GDevelop is an open-source, cross-platform game engine designed for everyone – it’s extensible, fast, and easy to learn. It also comes with an array of assets that makes 2D game development extremely quick.
Godot provides a huge set of common tools, so you can just focus on making your game without reinventing the wheel. Godot is completely free and open-source under the very permissive MIT license. No strings attached, no royalties, nothing. Your game is yours, down to the last line of engine code.
A very accessible scripting language by the creator of CookieClicker that allows you to rapidly put together an engaging Idle Clicker game.
A free, open-source game engine, made especially for Java game developers who want to create 3D games using modern technology. The software is programmed entirely in Java, intended for wide accessibility and quick deployment.
Libgdx is a Java game development framework that provides a unified API that works across all supported platforms. The framework provides an environment for rapid prototyping and fast iterations. Instead of deploying to Android/iOS/Javascript after each code change, you can run and debug your game on the desktop, natively. Desktop JVM features like code hot-swapping reduce your iteration times considerably.
Lumberyard is architected for performance, modularity, and productivity. Reduce time to quality and maximize ambition, across PC, console, and mobile.
melonJS is a lightweight yet powerful HTML5 framework designed from the ground up to provide a true plugin-free ‘write-once, run-everywhere’ gaming platform. melonJS is an open-source project and supported by a community of enthusiasts. See our Gallery for a few examples of games powered by melonJS.
microStudio includes all you need to write code, create sprites and maps for a 2D game, all from within your web browser. Your project is stored in the cloud and available from anywhere. Build games everywhere.
By leveraging C# and other .NET languages on Microsoft and Mono platforms you can write modern, fast, and reliable game code.
Since 2001, OGRE has grown to become one of the most popular open-source graphics rendering engines, and has been used in a large number of production projects, in such diverse areas as games, simulators, educational software, interactive art, scientific visualization, and others.
Panda3D is an open-source, completely free-to-use engine for real-time 3D games, visualizations, simulations, experiments — you name it! Its rich feature set readily tailors to your specific workflow and development needs.
A fast, free, and fun open-source framework for Canvas and WebGL powered browser games.
PixiJS’s strength is speed. When it comes to 2D rendering, PixiJS is the fastest there is. Friendly, feature-rich API lets PixiJS take care of the fundamentals whilst you focus on producing incredible multiplatform experiences. PixiJS is and always will be Open Source, with a large and supportive community pushing its growth and evolution.
PlayCanvas is used by studios large and small to make lightweight messenger games, online multiplayer games, extraordinary product configurators, architectural visualizations, and more.
Simple enough for a child, powerful enough for a developer! RPGMAKER was born to fulfill the desire of creating an original RPG without programming knowledge. With the latest installment, RPGMAKER MV allows the dreams of many of its fans to come true!
RELEASE YOUR CREATIVITY. SMILE GAME BUILDER is software to make RPGs for your PC.
Spring is a versatile 3D RTS game engine. Using extensively Lua for scripting game-specific code to make nearly every aspect of the engine customizable, from GUI to unit AI, to pathfinding.
The SpriteKit framework makes it easy to create high-performance, battery-efficient 2D games. With support for custom OpenGL ES shaders and lighting, integration with SceneKit, and advanced new physics effects and animations, you can add force fields, detect collisions, and generate new lighting effects in your games.
2D HTML5 rendering and layout engine for game development.
Twine is an amazing way to create narrative-driven stories. If you can tell a story, you can make an amazing game!
Unity’s real-time 3D development platform lets artists, designers, and developers work together to create amazing immersive and interactive experiences. (Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.)
Unreal Engine is a state-of-the-art real-time engine and editor that features photorealistic rendering, dynamic physics and effects, lifelike animation, robust data translation, and much more—on an open, extensible platform that won’t tie you down.
Urho3D is a free lightweight, cross-platform 2D and 3D game engine implemented in C++ and released under the MIT license. Greatly inspired by OGRE and Horde3D.
Do you have a game engine or low-code/no-code game tool that is missing from this list? Contact us or leave it in the comments!