Game Engine Overview

In the last decade, video games have gained immense popularity. More and more video games for PCs and smartphones are being released, while traditional consoles are partially lagging behind. It is becoming more and more lucrative to work as a game developer, either by launching your own app or by joining a larger project.

Open Source software has also advanced a lot in this decade. Open source engines have great advantages over proprietary software. For example, they are lighter and require less hardware. In addition, you don´t need to spend money on payment licenses and the source code of the game is available to anyone who wants to review it. In addition, you can create multiplatform games.

Undoubtedly, open source is the future of games and even, the development of software in general. Here we recommend 5 of the best open source game engines this year:

Godot Game Engine

according to several experts, Godot is one of the most powerful multiplatform 2D and 3D gaming engines. The purpose of Godot is to offer the developer a fully integrated development environment under the MIT license. The games created with the Godot engine are programmed in C#, C++ or Godot's own programming language: GDScript, which is based on Python.

In addition, Godot has a very powerful renderer that is capable of creating great game graphics, whether in 2D or 3D. With Godot, you can create a game for literally any operating system, be it iOS, Android, Windows or Linux. Highly recommended.

Spring Game Engine

This is an open source engine to create real-time strategy games (RTS) and is published under the GNU General Public License (GNU - GPL). Some popular games like Spring: 1994, Zero-K and Evolution-RTS were built using this game engine. Without a doubt, this is one of the best open source game engines that you can use if you are a novice developer.

It was launched for the first time in June 2007. It is very customizable since it allows you to use Lua, a light and multi-paradigm programming language that allows you to adjust almost all aspects of the engine to your liking. Without a doubt, recommended.

Panda 3D Game Engine

This great game engine is very popular among developers. Basically it is an open source framework that can be used for literally anything, from developing 3D games, to simulations, experiments, etc. Panda 3D was born as an engine of The Disney VR Studio to create 3D attractions for Disney theme parks.

It is a free engine and is BSD licensed. The games developed with that engine are written in C++ and Python. Without a doubt, highly recommended and easy to use.

Cocos 2D-x Game Engine

This is another brilliant open source multiplatform engines and is published under the MIT license. Written in C++, Cocos2d-x and can be used to create games, applications and other interactive programs. One of its great advantages which make it very popular among developers is that the engine allows them to use C++, Lua and JavaScript for the multi-platform implementation for any OS, such as Linux or Windows.

Cocos2d-x is optimized for 2D graphics with OpenGL and has an excellent renderer. Recommendable.

idTech 4 Game Engine

id Tech 4 is one of the oldest alternatives in the world of game engines, being released on August 3, 2004. Also known as Doom 3, id Tech 4 is an engine open source developed by id software and served as the basis to create games such as Doom 3, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Wolfenstein, etc. Id Tech 4 uses a complete scripting language to write mods, being quite similar to C++. In addition, the engine has another scripting language for the GUI.

Conclusion

In our opinion, id Tech 4 and Spring Engine are the best engines available from this list, due to its high customization capacity and many tools that are offered to programmers. Godot is also a very good engine. In any case, any of these engines will serve you perfectly for your plans to create a new game, as all are first class and highly recommended.