DevelopmentGame Development

What are the best JavaScript game engines?

11

Options
Considered

73

User
Recs.

Aug 16, 2018

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

11 Options Considered

Best JavaScript game engines	Price	Languages	License
-- Phaser	-	–	–
-- Babylon.js	-	–	–
-- GDevelop	Free	–	–
-- Impact	-	–	–
-- OpenFL	-	Haxe	MIT

Babylon.js

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Top Pro

Helpful and friendly community

Thanks to the increasing popularity of Babylon, it has a growing community of helpful developers. It's easy to find help on their forum. See More

Top Con

Weak visual tools

Babylon.js has its own editor but it has been weakly developed and does not support a lot of features of engine. See More

Top Pro

Powerful 3D Framework using WebGL

Top Con

Young project

Babylon is quite young compared to many of it's competitors (released in 2013). The community is still somewhat small, however growing quickly. See More

Top Pro

Support for native exporters for 3dsMax, Blender3d and Unity3D

Babylon.js files can be produced directly from well-known designer tools. See More

Top Pro

Actively developed

Babylon has great project health, with activity on Github daily for bug fixes and new features. See More

Top Pro

Has a built-in WebGL 2D Engine to build UI in screen space or inside the 3D world

The Canvas2D feature is a 100% WebGL based 2D Engine which allows to draw text, sprite, primitives (rectangle, ellipsis, complex lines..) with the possibility to interact and animate them. It also feature a grouping feature, positioning using margin/padding/alignment and different layout engine to position/size the 2D components. The Canvas2D can be create in Screen Space: over the 3D Scene, useful for UI or in WorldSpace as a rectangle which will be drawn into the 3D scene like any other kind of 3D objects. See More

Top Pro

Playground

Babylon.js comes with a really powerful playground page where you can try and learn with your browser only. See More

Top Pro

Plenty of tutorials and examples

Babylon provides a playground where you can explore examples and play with the code. The official documentation offers a wide variety of well-written tutorials on topics from beginner to advanced. Additionally, there are many tutorials written by the community available that you can find by doing a google search. See More

Top Pro

Support for physically based rendering

PBR rendering techniques aim to simulate real life lighting. See More

Top Pro

Sponsored by Microsoft

Microsoft supports server side services, such as Playground. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity as a foundation

Babylon.js is developed from the ground up to be extremely easy to use. Documentation site is kept up to date. See More

Top Pro

Out of the box physics engine support (Cannon.js, OIMO.js)

Top Pro

Support for special effects

Babylon.js supports particles, lens flares, postprocesses, realtime reflection and refraction. See More

Top Pro

Excellent extensions

Extensions can be viewed here. See More

Top Pro

ShaderBuilder makes any shader in JavaScript

ShaderBuilder, a Babylon extension, is a shader text builder with useful functions that allows you a lot of flexibility when making shaders. See More

Top Pro

Open source

You would have to pay for on other platforms what is readily available for free, with the right amount of personal effort. See More

GDevelop

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Top Pro

Online version available, compatible with iOS and Android

Thanks to its open source nature, GDevApp.com was built over the GDevelop engine. GDevApp.com is a complete game creator similar to GDevelop, available directly in your browser and compatible with iPad and most Android tablets and phone! The app is perfect for making games directly from your sofa and you can even start a game on GDevApp and export it to open it inside GDevelop. See More

Top Con

Still needs more tutorials

It has not bad documentation and forum but still needs more tutorials (although there are some good examples to learn from). See More

Experience

DevotedRhea

Easy to use but powerful. Excellent to create training and educational professional content. The HTML5 export feature is great and works like a charm on all platforms. 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

Top Con

No cross-compiler

The Windows and Linux versions of GDevelop can each compile a native application; but the Windows version cannot compile for Linux, nor vice versa. See More

Top Pro

New documentation for gd5 is good for starting

A new doc is improving for gd5 that is nice for beginners and after that you can learn more from examples. Also, gd4 wiki is still there. See More

Top Pro

Open source plugin SDK

The plugin SDK is open source, so if you want to extend it, you can. 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

Support both native and HTML5 games (web and mobile development)

GDevelop is able to create HTML5 games that can run on web browsers and be exported to iOS and Android using solutions like Intel XDK or Cocoon.JS. GDevelop is also one of the only friendly game creator that is able to make native games for Windows and Linux, which are blazing fast and allow to make advanced games with lots of objects, effects and very large levels. See More

Top Pro

Multilanguage support

GDevelop is available in many languages and even community can help in translations. See More

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

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

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

Impact

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Top Pro

Excellent collision detection system

Impact provides 2 types of collision detection; static and dynamic collisions. Both of which are easily integrated into game development. See More

Top Pro

Extendable

Many plugins are available, including one called Impact++ which adds features like pathfinding and dynamic lighting. See More

Top Pro

Level editor

Built-in map editor with support for tiling, collision layers, and actors. See More

Top Pro

Extensive documentation available to support development

ImpactJS has an active user community that busily produces tremendous resources including videos, books, tutorials, walkthroughs and more. There are also comprehensive class documentation available. See More

Top Pro

Truly cross-platform allowing developers to build for anything

Extending the reach of a game developed with ImpactJS is easy due to the cross-platform nature the framework. There are Considerations around performance, resolution and audio, however all can be appropriately addressed when in development. Works in the browser via Canvas, even on mobile. Easily translatable into a packaged app. See More

Crafty

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Top Con

No WebGL renderer

Doesn't support WebGL renderer, only Canvas and DOM. See More

Specs

Languages:Javascript

CreateJS

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Platino

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