Last Updated on December 10, 2018
It’s been ages since we’re recommended the best game engines. After a lot of testing, it’s clear there’s a few amazing open source game engines that need to be added to our recommendations in this genre.
Game engines offer huge benefits to game developers. The main functionality they provide is the library of core functions used in a computer game. This often includes a realtime rendering engine for 2D or 3D graphics, physics engine with collision detection, a character animation system, scene graph, sound, artificial intelligence, threading, networking, input, streaming localization support, debugging tools, integration with languages, and the provision of performance monitoring and optimization tools.
Game engines play a crucial role in the fast creation and development of computer games. As they offer a collection of visual development tools, and are often presented in an integrated development environment, they vastly accelerate the development of games. Game engines are referred to as “game middleware” because they provide a flexible and reusable software platform.
For most games, game engines offer an architecture with overall high performance rendering capabilities, and with access to fast graphics API.
All of our recommended game engines are free to download, released under an open source license, and don’t employ any type of royalty model for commercial use.
| Game Engines | |
|---|---|
| Urho3D | Cross-platform 2D and 3D game engine |
| T-Engine4 | Roguelike game engine |
| Godot | Advanced 2D and 3D cross-platform compatible game engine |
| MonoGame | Framework for creating powerful cross-platform games |
| Cocos2d-x | Framework written in C++. Build games, apps and other cross platform GUI based interactive programs |
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |