arcademakersources/arcademaker

ArcadeMaker is a 2D game engine that comes with its own small programming language and a built-in editor. The engine and the editor are both written in C#, but when you actually make a game inside ArcadeMaker you write the game logic in the author's own language, called Exp, not in C#. The look and feel is modelled on GameMaker 8, so anyone who has used that old tool should find it familiar. Underneath, the graphics and sound come from MonoGame, a free library that runs on desktop computers, phones, and games consoles. The author also wants to add a second backend called KNI later so that games can run inside a web browser. Right now the project ships a build in the GitHub Releases section, but the README is clear that this is an early snapshot rather than a real release. There is no button to export a finished game into a standalone program, and finishing a real game with it is not yet realistic. The project has been put together over several years in separate bursts, which is why some pieces are further along than others. The editor already supports backgrounds, parent objects, and many object events, but the new engine core only understands the Create, Step, and Draw events so far, and several features that exist in the editor have no matching code in the engine yet. The next item on the list is to add background support to the engine, followed by parent objects and a fix for view-follow speed. The author explains that they are open-sourcing the project because they no longer have enough time to push it forward alone, and they hope other people will experiment with the engine, improve the Exp language, fill in missing functions like drawRect or setFont, write documentation, and produce example games. Building it locally is a normal C# workflow: clone the repository, open the solution in Visual Studio, Rider, or VS Code, restore NuGet packages, build, and run the editor project. The code is released under the MIT licence. The README notes that GPT helped write the README itself and that Claude helped with the collision-detection maths, but the rest of the engine, editor, and language is hand-written.