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DevelopmentGame DevelopmentGame Engine

What are the best 2D game engines for low end machines/laptops?

17

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Considered

546

User
Recs.

Feb 4, 2024

Last
Updated

16 Options Considered

Best 2D game engines for low end machines/laptops	Price	Platforms	Popular Language Bindings
74 Godot	-	Windows, Linux, Mac, Android	GDScript, C#, C++
67 Unity 2D	Free+	Windows, Linux, Mac	-
61 LÖVE	-	-	-
-- MonoGame	Free	Windows, Linux, Mac, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch	-
-- Solar 2D (formerly Corona SDK)	-	-	-

Godot

Top Pro

Free and open source

Godot is licensed under MIT license. Anyone can grab the source from https://github.com/godotengine/godot and compile the engine him/herself. See More

Top Con

Slow performance

GDscript is a slow programming language. Has bad performance on old computers and smartphones. See More

VivaciousErebus's Experience

Godot 3 is very inefficient on low end platforms. In fact due to the design choices using Nodes and Node trees rather than components this engine will always be inefficient. The new version is heavy WIP and old version just doesn't perform well enough for platforms such as mobile, raspberryPI, embedded. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android

Popular Language Bindings:GDScript, C#, C++

Top Pro

Active development

This engine barely released one year ago has more than 1000 forks on github and about 100 developers. Not only that just a bit of browsing trough issues you will quickly find out the dev community loves new esp free technology and does not shy away from completely rewriting parts of the engine. By feb 2016 Vulkan will be supported including a complete 3D engine overhaul. The audio engine is being completely rewritten to use threads and so forth. See More

Top Con

Needs GPU for 2D

Not optimized for 2D operations without GPU. But see https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/3634 for an attempt to at least make it run there. See More

Top Pro

Animate everything

You can animate everything that you change in the property list , it even has 2D skeleton animation. See More

Top Con

Tileset management could be more efficient

The tileset creation and management is lacking common features found in more developed tileset managers. However, it features support for Tiled - the only downside being that it is an external program. See More

Top Pro

Multi-platform editor

Works under Linux, Mac, Windows. See More

Top Con

No built-in way to import atlases

Godot does not have an easy and automatic way to import atlases created by other tools. However, there are plugins that can be used to import atlases from other engines. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

The executable is portable and less than 40 MB in size. See More

Top Con

C++ Engine API not very friendly

The base C++ code from Godot is not documented, it's hard to set it up, to compile and hard to extend, it could use better programming standards. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn scripting language

Godot has their own scripting language called GDscript. The scripting language is easy to learn with python-like format, but it is not python. More like a mix of Javascript, PHP, C++. It's very powerful, easy to learn, and it's free of unnecessary things because it's designed for this purpose. It can be used to add custom behaviors to any object by extending it with scripting, using the built-in editor with syntax highlighting and code completion. A built-in debugger with breakpoints and stepping can be used and graphs for possible bottlenecks can be checked. See More

Top Con

Self-designed scripting language

Implementing new scripting language instead of using an existing scripting engine (such as Lua or V8 JS) looks expensive, but easy to learn. See More

Top Pro

Built-in physics

Add physics to 2D and 3D scenes, through rigid and static bodies, characters, raycasts, vehicles and more. See More

Top Con

NoAdmob or other AdNetwork support

Godot has no native support for implementing advertisements into your game. See More

Top Pro

Export to multiple platforms

Exports to Linux, OSx, Windows, iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Haiku ( and tested on other systems like PS3 , Xbox, Blackberry) See More

Top Con

HTML5 exported games are slow

Godot uses Emscripten which emulates C++ code, which is ineffective and uses a lot of memory. Here are related issues https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Aplatform%3Ahtml5 See More

Top Pro

Nodes and Scenes

The way that Godot works is that every object is a node and every node has a parent and a scene that acts like a node too so you can use it like any other default nodes. See More

Top Pro

Editor and runtime are fully cross-platform

You can run Godot on all 3 major operating systems (Windows/Mac/Linux) and build your game to all available platforms from each without any platform-specific work needed. All platforms including Linux are supported first class. See More

Top Pro

Can be deployed to multiple platforms

Deploy games to desktops (Windows/OS X/Linux), smartphones (iOS/Android/BlackBerry), and the web (HTML5 via Emscripten). See More

Top Pro

Friendly towards Version Control Systems

The engine is built not only to support version control but to really use it. Scene files for example which usually get compiled into some sort of unreadable data stay in a text format - that way you can actually see your changes in a version control system like Git. See More

Top Pro

Instancing and node concept makes sense

The node and the instancing concept work very well and helps developers to structure content efficiently. See More

Top Pro

Fully dedicated 2D engine, no hacks

Godot 2.1 has a improved 2d engine with many features used by modern 2D games. See More

Top Pro

The list of supported languages is growing

Officially supported languages, for now, are GDScript, C#(Mono), VisualScript and C++. See More

Top Pro

Fun to use

An important aspect that can't be grasped without using the engine for a few days. The Interface is evolving nicely and making games is just fun. See More

Top Pro

Unified game editor interface

All the game developing work is done inside one program: the engine editor. This feature is something only high end engines have. Even the scripting is done in the same program. No need for Eclipse or other front end editors. See More

Top Pro

Internationalization of the editor

You can change the language shown in menus. Godot translations. See More

Top Pro

User friendly UI for all your team

Non-programmers (musicians, artists, etc) can join the development easily. See More

Top Pro

Supports visual programming

Top Pro

Integrated animation editor

Every property can be animated. See More

Top Pro

Drag & drop interface

Many parts of the editor allow you to drag & drop, which makes working with assets and scene trees a joy. See More

Top Pro

Really good community

The community is great and really cares about the engine. It is easy to get help and to be part of Godot's future. See More

Top Pro

Built-in documentation linked to the internal ScriptEditor

The editor has a fully searchable index of class API documentation for everything the engine offers (NOT just a web interface). You can easily open the documentation for any class by Ctrl-clicking the class's name in the in-engine text editor for scripts. See More

Top Pro

Under constant development

This engine barely released one year ago has more than 1000 forks on github and about 100 developers. Not only that just a bit of browsing trough issues you will quickly find out the dev community loves new esp free technology and does not shy away from completely rewriting parts of the engine. The audio engine is being completely rewritten to use threads and so forth. See More

Top Pro

Scene Based editing

Godot gives you the ability to create scenes to make your life easier, with reusable objects and things you want to incorporate in your games. This makes the game making processvery streamlined and organized. See More

Top Pro

Simple and readable codebase

The engine's source code is easy to read and understand with a self-documenting approach to code design. You don't have to wait months or years for other people to fix an engine bug that is important to your game. Often times, you can spend an hour or two of your own time to fix whatever problems you encounter yourself. See More

Top Pro

Easily expanded scripting system

With 3.0's addition of NativeScript and PluginScript via GDNative, developers can easily define bindings for new scripting languages. In addition to the primarily supported C++, GDScript, VisualScript, and C# languages, the community has contributed D, Nim, and Python as well with more on the way. See More

Top Pro

Creating editor tools is a breeze

Godot Engine is itself a Godot game. By adding the "tool" keyword to the top of a script, you can design extensions for the editor itself INSIDE the editor. Integrating these editor scripts into a bundled plugin for sharing is extremely easy to do. See More

Top Pro

Can be installed on Steam

You can easily install Godot via the Steam store. See More

Top Pro

Frequent updates

Top Pro

Doesn't need to be installed into the system

Godot is very portable I can download the file from my website then put it on a USB and run it on my other Computer without any troublesome errors about Installing the software See More

Unity 2D

Top Pro

Integrates with Mecanim

Mecanim brings state machines and blending to 2D bone animation. The state machine editor allows for designers and programmers to visually create a Finite State Machine (FSM) to control when animations should play. Mecanim also allows for blending so an animation can transition smoothly between two states without the need of in between frames made by an animator. See More

Top Con

Poor script interface for texture atlases

Accessing individual sprites within an atlas texture is possible at runtime, but requires use of the Resources folder subsystem. See More

LearnedThaleia's Experience

HELLOMOTHERF........ See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Sprite Sheet and Bone based animation supported

Both types of 2D animation for game development are supported in Unity’s system and can be used interchangeably in the timeline. See More

Top Con

Lacks critical features

Vertices can't be animated, so you can't have ANY organic feel (like... lungs breathing). Parent bone can't be animated without affecting the children. This is especially impeding for organic feel, again. No option to show & unshow assets (or it is hidden), like for switching weapon on your character for exemple. See More

PrivateNuadaAirgetlam's Experience

its very easy just import scripts and make your gam See More

Top Pro

Built into Unity 4.3+

2D game creation was a major feature request from the Unity community and was added with version 4.3. 2D is provided in both the Pro and Free distribution of Unity. See More

Top Pro

Easily change sprites dynamically

Usually used for character customization, programmers can change any sprite in a bone animation at runtime easily by referencing the bone and loading the new sprite from the resources folder. See More

LÖVE

Top Pro

Lightweight and easy to start with

Top Con

Documentation is very dry and technical

The site has plenty of tutorials, true, but they all read very technical, and explain very little. This might be too much for beginners, even for coding purposes, because of the fact that the specifics aren't explained well enough to learn effectively. The docs can be found frustrating to understand even the basics, such as tables or the like, because of how poorly they are explained, and how few examples are given before expecting you to be able to use them. See More

Specs

Languages:C++, Lua 5.1

Mobile targets:Android 4.0+, iOS 8+

Desktop targets:Windows Vista+, macOS 10.7+, Linux

Top Pro

Very good documentation

The LÖVE wiki provides full documentation of its easy to use Modules, which are conveniently located on the side bar of the wiki. It took seconds to find the module for love.keyboard, which provided a list of all functions along with arguments and examples where the function could be used. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS. See More

Top Pro

Great for prototyping

You can learn the basics very quickly and start making simple games in no time, even if you have no previous Lua knowledge. If you're a little experienced with LÖVE, you can prototype a 2D game with it in no time. See More

Top Pro

Open source and free

The LÖVE engine is licensed under The zlib/libpng License (which is very short and human readable) which allows you to use the source code and even modify it as long as you do not claim that the original source code is yours. You can obtain the code at this bitbucket repository and even help fix bugs and participate in the development of LÖVE. See More

Top Pro

Uses the fantastic Lua for scripting

Lua is a embeddable scripting language designed to be lightweight, fast yet powerful. It is used in major titles such as Civilization as well as a lot of indie games. Lua is very popular because it provides "meta language" features. You can implement object-oriented structures, or pure procedural functions, etc. It has a very simple C interface, and gives the engine developer a lot of flexibility in the language itself. Artists tend to love Lua too because it's very approachable, with plain and forgiving syntax. Lua is free open-source software, distributed under a very liberal license (the well-known MIT license). See More

Top Pro

Active and very friendly community

The LÖVE forums are extremely helpful. With people checking the forums every day, it won't take long to receive answer to your questions on the Support board, receive feedback on games you post in the Projects board, as well as have a chat about the LÖVE engine while learning tricks to use in the very active General board. If you need an immediate answer though, or just want to chat, there is a very active and helpful IRC channel. See More

Top Pro

Easy to understand and use

Lua2D handles loading the resources, reading input, playing sounds and displaying stuff on the screen. Only the logic is left for the developer to write. It also removes the overhead of having to use and learn a GUI game editor. All you need is a knowledge of Lua and your favourite text editor or IDE. See More

Top Pro

Can develop within Android

It is possible to develop games directly on a tablet or cellphone with the Android system by using the experimental Android branch. See More

Solar 2D (formerly Corona SDK)

Top Pro

Great community

Top Con

Free, but not completely

Such conventional plugins as a reference to AdMob for example, cost $300 per year! See More

Specs

Mobile targets:iOS; Android; Kindle; Windows Phone 8

Desktop targets:Windows; Macintosh

Top Pro

Marketplace for 3rd party plug-ins

Top Con

Making a device build requires internet connection

To build your app for the device (iOS/Android/AppleTV) Corona requires to fetch resources from online. This would include base application template and plugins. This allows not to perform local build or use Xcode or Android Studio to do a build. Even Large games/apps would build very fast with good internet connection. Your code never leaves computed. Corona SDK would transfer some information to determine which plugins and pieces has to be transferred in order to make a final steps in build. As a bonus - you get basically one button press to get from your Corona Simulator game to game on a device. See More

Top Pro

Active community

If you have questions about Corona, you probably would find answers already, but if you don't you can use forums and get answers and help you need. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation, easy to start and to use

Corona has great documentation, you can find lots of guides, how to get started + lots and lots of video tutorials and explanations. See More

Top Pro

Free

You can use Corona SDK free of charge or royalties. Payed subscriptions required only to develop plugins, which are not among vast existing library of plugins. See More

Top Pro

Ability to call any native (C/C++/Obj-C/Java) library

Top Pro

Content scaling

It's easy to create a game that looks good on many different sized mobile devices. See More

Top Pro

Amazing learning curve

Corona does not throw photoshop-like madness full of buttons editor. You can go as fast as you want, learning and building game from ground up. Eventually, you'll learn how much corona is doing for you. But to start you don't have to master complex editor software. It's a great tool to learn to start game development if you want to learn how to program and make games. Your experience will be 100% transferable to any other Pro game engine. See More

Top Pro

Lua syntax

Uses the great and easy-to-learn Lua programming language. See More

Top Pro

Very comprehensive API

It's very quick to get things up and running with Corona SDK. The API is extensive and while it's not 100% feature-complete with the iOS API, it's close enough that you could create tons of games and never run into a roadblock. The API docs can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Very simple to use

Top Pro

Well-supported

Top Pro

Marketplace for third party plug-ins

Top Pro

Good documentation and lots of tutorials

Top Pro

Live builds - update builds running on a device automatically

With the live build feature, once you have created a build and installed on a device, you get lightning fast turnaround times because any change on the code or data is updated to the devices running the game (within the local WiFi) immediately. So changes can be tested on the real hardware within a very few seconds. What's even more impressive, this even works flawless with multiple devices running the game. You have to use it to learn how good of a feature this is while development and even more, while doing QA. Imagine fixing bugs and everyone of your QA team/friends/whoever helps to get your game done, has all changes on his device without doing anything but waiting 5 seconds - outstanding. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform desktop and mobile

Corona works on OS X, Windows and Android (including Kindle Fire & Nook). See More

Top Pro

Corona simulator

Corona SDK ships with Corona Simulator, which runs your game/app directly on your PC/Mac and updates every time you make changes. It provides immediate feedback to your actions, you can see your changes right on the screen, without necessity to make build to device. Getting instant feedback really boosts tenfold prototyping and development speed. See More

Allegro

Top Pro

Supports desktop and mobile

Support for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iPhone, and Android. See More

Top Con

Isn't great for C++

If you are a fan of object oriented programming, and want to use this library, then the chances are that you are going to be creating a lot of wrappers for functions in this library. In short, if you're a C++ person, it could be recommended to check out SFML instead. See More

Specs

Languages:C, C++

Platforms:Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, IOS

Top Pro

Good engine architecture

Allegro is well designed, easy to use and has many useful features. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation and lots of tutorials

Since it has been in development since mid-90s with hundreds of people contributing to both the engine and documentation, it has all of its bases covered when it comes to standard support. See More

GDevelop

Top Pro

Powerful events system to create games without programming

No need for coding using this system which is clear and powerful: events are composed of conditions and actions. Actions are launched when conditions are fulfilled. This is a very friendly way of making games and is still efficient for advanced usage, contrary to most other "block"/"drag'n'drop" systems. See More

Specs

Languages:C++, JavaScript

Mobile targets:Android 5+, iOS 11+

Desktop targets:Windows 7+, macOS 10.11+, Linux

Top Pro

Quickly add behaviors to objects

Prebuilt behaviors can be added to objects. This is a very efficient way to add a physics engine or make a platformer game. Lots of behaviors are included, from the most advanced (Physics, platformer, top-down movement) to really simple one (like the behavior to destroy objects when outside the screen or the one to drag objects with mouse or touch). And you still have full controls over your game as behaviors can be modified using the events! See More

Top Pro

Lots of features to build games

The engine includes pathfinding, physics engine, multitouch support, custom hitboxes, platformer engine, tiled maps, multiple layers and cameras out of the box. All of these features can be used without programming knowledge, using the visual editors. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

The whole interface is intuitive and easy to learn: each part of the game can be designed using visual editors. The objects editor is used to create the objects of the game, the scene editor help you to build the levels of your game and the events editor allows to give life to the whole game without programming. See More

Top Pro

Free and open-source

GDevelop's runtime libraries are MIT licensed. It can be used freely for projects of any type and there are no royalties associated with publishing games developed with GDevelop. See More

libGDX

Top Pro

Doesn't force a specific design

Unlike some engines, which only allow you to make your game in a few specific ways, libGDX allows you to design any type of game you wish as it is extremely customisable. See More

Top Con

Most IDEs are resource intensive

Most of the IDEs that support libGDX development are Java-based, which unfortunately are pretty resource intensive. See More

Specs

Mobile targets:iOS; Android; BlackBerry; Desktop; HTML5

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux; HTML5

Top Pro

Great performance

libGDX has been shown to outperform other popular frameworks across multiple platforms. See More

Top Con

Java dependency

libGDX is written in Java. While there are ways to build it into native binaries, its intended and supported use is with the JVM, which has performance ramifications. See More

Top Pro

Free & Open Source

libGDX uses the Apache License 2.0. See More

Top Pro

Cross-Platform

Allows you to publish to Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, BlackBerry and HTML5. See More

Top Pro

Active, helpful community

The official libGDX forum is a great resource for both technical help and design feedback. There's also an official #libgdx IRC channel on Freenode. See More

SFML

Top Con

No GUI editor or IDE

Does not include any IDE or media editor. It's purely source code. See More

Top Pro

Available in many languages

There's support for many languages besides C++, current supported languages are: C, .NET, Crystal, D, Euphoria, Go, Java, Julia, Nim, OCaml, Pascal, Python, Ruby and Rust, and this list is constantly growing. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Works on every platform

SFML 2.2 brought forth Android & iOS functionality, and SFML games work on Linux, Mac and Windows out of the box, since SFML is written with OpenGL. See More

Top Pro

Active community and wiki

You can ask questions on their own personal forum which is full of users, and their wiki is constantly being maintained. They even have an IRC See More

Top Pro

Great Documentation

SFML is very well documented, even with short examples of use for many functions and modules. Furthermore, there are books like 'SFML essentials' and 'SFML for game development' which teach you how to use this library to its fullest. See More

TIC-80

Top Pro

Retro-styled and restricted environment

Pixelated Software with a good retro style. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

TIC-80 is an open-source mini retro game engine with built-in tools. See More

Specs

Languages:Lua, JavaScript, Moonscript, Fennel, Wren

Platforms:Web, Windows, Linux, Mac, Android

Top Pro

Many Scripting languages' supported

Use awesome scripting languages like: Lua, Wren, Moonscript, JS, Ruby, etc. See More

Top Pro

Free

Free version already includes most features but a paid version is available. See More

Top Pro

All tools in one place

The app contains tools for coding, sprite editing, map editing, sfx and music editing. See More

Top Pro

Export

Exports easily to Windows, Windows-XP, mac, Linux and HTML. See More

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