been working on a 2D Unity-like game engine from scratch: C++ with SDL3 renderer, Luau scripting, scene hierarchy and behavior system, and interactive editor in an integrated webview. Still some rough edges but the pieces are all there!

Very, very neat. Would love to read a blog post about your experience building it.

Hmm I might have to do that

The instant game tree preview is really cool!

If you can nail the equivalents of: - scriptable objects - shader graph - anim state machine - serialized inspector refs You're pretty much 80% of the way there, UX wise. Love the Lua choice; ever consider go? EbitEngine is go based and absolutely rocks. Nice work!!

@DaggerJockey For a 2d engine what would you imagine you’d use the anim state machine for? Modular sprite animation?

Ah, just 2d...maybe 2d skeletal deform based anim?

@DaggerJockey yeah that'd be sweet! btw what do you mean by serialized inspector refs

Drag and drop inspector refs; where you can connect one component/script to another in the UI

@DaggerJockey ah yes absolutely!

Cool stuff ! How do you show the game inside the editor if it's a webview ? Is it based on electron and the game inside is built to wasm ? or is it a native app and the ui is a webview above it ?

It’s a native app with the web view above the sdl viewport. The Web is simply transparent where I want the game and it reports where the bounding rect is for it to draw to

As someone who loves using new toolkits I'll be following this!

Thanks! It’s been fun

Luau my beloved being used in standalone projects!

I've been interested in creation of game engines And even though i got SDL3 working on Common Lisp , it might be a tad bit too much to learn all at once , and so will try out C++ with SDL3 .

hows sdl3 over 2, in a good spot?

I really wouldn’t know. I hear sdl2 has better support but I don’t have first hand experience. First time using it

Looks amazing! Do you render the game view with OpenGL?

Pretty much copied lmao come up with something original

The demo project is a clone of asteroids - a game made in 1979, just a bit before

this looks nice!

could've used lua. python. C#. GDScript. he picked luau. roblox's scripting language. for a standalone engine that has nothing to do with roblox

Because luau *is* a standalone embeddable language that makes no assumptions about Roblox. It’s just Lua but with types. It’s also a an optional superset of Lua so you don’t have to use types if you don’t want them