kaijuengine/kaiju

Kaiju is a 2D and 3D game engine written in Go (a programming language known for being fast and straightforward to read). It uses Vulkan, a low-level graphics system, to render games at high speed. The engine comes with a built-in visual editor, meaning you can build and preview your game without leaving the tool itself. One notable design choice: the editor is actually a game running inside the engine, which demonstrates the team's confidence in the engine's own foundation. The engine covers a wide range of features: 2D and 3D game creation, particle effects, skeletal and sprite animation, a custom UI system with an option to write interface layouts using HTML and CSS, physics simulation, 3D spatial audio, and live shader editing that lets you see visual changes in real time without restarting. Games built with it can run on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android. The team chose Go specifically because it is a modern systems-level language that is fast, easy to learn, and avoids the complex template and macro systems found in older engine languages like C++. The engine's performance is a stated priority: in the creator's own tests, an equivalent scene runs several times faster in Kaiju than in Unity. The team attributes this to careful memory management and direct use of Vulkan rather than higher-level graphics wrappers. The project is open source and actively developed, with a public project board and a Discord community for contributors and users. The engine itself is described as production-ready, but the editor is still a work in progress and not yet stable for production use. The engine supports plugins written in Go, so developers can extend it without learning a separate scripting language. Fast build times are a deliberate goal of the project. To get started, you clone the repository along with its pre-built library submodule, install Go and the required build tools, and run a single build command. Local documentation is available through a separate tool called mkdocs.