Best Game Engines for Linux

The world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool. With Unreal Engine, you can bring amazing real-time experiences to life using the world’s most advanced real-time 3D creation tool. From first projects to the most demanding challenges, our free and accessible resources and inspirational community empower everyone to realize their ambitions. With over 160 hours of free online learning content, an extensive library of webinars, and options for instructor-led training, we have a way to learn that's right for you. Unreal creators are the true power behind Unreal Engine. Be part of a community that builds cutting-edge experiences, and supports each other along the way. Explore comprehensive reference documentation, instructional guides, community-based support, and options for dedicated professional support.

As you probably know by now, LÖVE is a framework for making 2D games in the Lua programming language. LÖVE is totally free, and can be used in anything from friendly open-source hobby projects, to evil, closed-source commercial ones. To make a minimal game, create a folder anywhere, and open up your favorite text editor. Sublime Text is a pretty good one for all operating systems, and it has Lua support built in. Create a new file in the folder you just created, and name it main.lua. Put the following code in the file, and save it.

Phaser is a fast, free, and fun open source HTML5 game framework that offers WebGL and Canvas rendering across desktop and mobile web browsers. It has been actively developed for over 10 years. Phaser is built on and around web standards and puts the browser first. Web export isn't an afterthought or checkbox on a feature list; it's our home. Phaser is fully open source, and you have unrestricted access to every last line of code in the core library. Phaser has more ready-made templates than any other game framework and is a great CLI tool. Games made with Phaser have been used as the cornerstone for marketing campaigns for years. They've been deployed everywhere, including as prominent features on sites for major Hollywood film blockbusters, massive brand promotional campaigns, educational content, interactive experiences, TV shows, news reports, charity fund-raising broadcasts, live events marketing, and so many more.

Defold is a free and open source game engine designed for high-performance cross-platform game development. It comes fully featured out of the box, requiring no setup or configuration, allowing developers to simply download the editor and start creating. The engine includes a visual editor, code editor, Lua scripting, Lua debugger, scene editor, particle editor, and tilemap editor, and supports both 2D and 3D game development. With a single codebase and no need for external tools, Defold enables publishing to major platforms such as PlayStation5, PlayStation4, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, Windows, Steam, HTML5, and Facebook. It offers a component-based system for building games, allowing the use of basic building blocks to create complex behavior, and supports writing game logic using Lua. Developers can add new functionality from the asset portal, set up their own local build environment, and write native code to extend the engine.

MonoGame is a free and open-source framework that allows developers to create cross-platform games using C# and other .NET languages. It supports multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. MonoGame provides a comprehensive set of features, such as 2D and 3D rendering, sound playback, input handling, and content management, enabling the development of high-quality games across various genres. The framework is a re-implementation of Microsoft's XNA 4 API, ensuring familiarity for developers with XNA experience. Notable games developed with MonoGame include "Streets of Rage 4," "Carrion," "Celeste," and "Stardew Valley." MonoGame is actively maintained by the MonoGame Foundation and its community, with ongoing updates and support.

Gideros is a free and open-source cross-platform game development framework that enables developers to create high-performance 2D games using the Lua programming language. It offers instant testing on real devices through Wi-Fi, eliminating the need for lengthy export or deployment processes. Built on C/C++ and OpenGL, Gideros ensures that games run at native speed, fully utilizing the power of CPUs and GPUs. The framework supports easy extension through plugins, allowing developers to import existing code in C, C++, Java, or Objective-C and bind it to Lua. Gideros provides its own class system with standard object-oriented programming practices, enabling clean and reusable code. The comprehensive development environment includes a lightweight IDE, players for desktops and devices, a texture packer, and a font creator. Gideros supports multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and HTML5.

Cocos2d-x is an open source, flexible, and lightweight cross-platform game engine that has been providing developers with stable and mature solutions since 2011. The engine offers interfaces in C++, Lua, and JavaScript, supporting platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and HTML5 browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Built upon OpenGL ES 2.0 and Metal for graphics rendering, Cocos2d-x fully exploits the GPU performance of mobile devices while maintaining compatibility. Developers can utilize Lua or JavaScript scripting languages to perform hot updates to games, eliminating the need to send packages to app stores and wait for review. The engine's open-source capabilities allow for extensive customization, enabling game companies to develop their own game types and extensions, including combining their own 3D engines to solve 2D interface and UI problems. According to test data, Cocos2d-x version 3.x is compatible with 99.7% of Android devices in China.

Stencyl isn't your average game creation software; it's a gorgeous, intuitive toolset that accelerates your workflow and then gets out of the way. We take care of the essentials, so you can focus on what's important - making your game yours. The best Stencyl games have reached top slots in the App Store and Google Play while being featured under the "Best New Game" section under their respective stores. Our best web games have been sponsored by major publishers such as ArmorGames, Kongregate and Newgrounds. Our drag-and-drop gameplay designer pays homage to the successful MIT Scratch project. We extend Scratch's simple block-snapping interface with new functionality and hundreds of ready-to-use block, Power users can create and share their own blocks, extend the engine through code, import libraries and write their own custom classes that interact seamlessly with block-based Behaviors.

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. Nodes for all your needs. Godot comes with hundreds of built-in nodes that make game design a breeze. You can also create your own for custom behaviors, editors and much more. Flexible scene system. Create node compositions with support for instancing and inheritance. Visual editor with all the tools you need packed into a beautiful and uncluttered context-sensitive UI. Friendly content creation pipeline for artists, level designers, animators and everyone in between. Persistent live editing where changes are not lost after stopping the game. It even works on mobile devices! Create your own custom tools with ease using the incredible tool system.

UNIGINE is a real-time 3D engine designed for enterprise and technology enthusiasts, offering photorealistic graphics and support for large virtual worlds through C++ and C# APIs. The engine is built with open-world capabilities in mind, featuring unique terrain technology that enables extreme detail up to 1 mm per pixel, along with runtime modification and collaborative editing. It supports 64-bit precision per coordinate, allowing for scenes as expansive as the solar system. UNIGINE provides three SDK editions tailored to different needs, the Sim SDK for simulation and training with planet-scale scenarios and immersive display setups; the engineering SDK, which is embeddable into enterprise applications such as digital twins, BIM, and smart city projects, featuring advanced GIS and CAD data handling; and the Community SDK for technical enthusiasts developing games and VR applications.