Vectarine
Key Features
Section titled “Key Features”User Friendly
Make games and prototypes quickly. Vectarine is snappy, launches instantly, exports instantly and doesn’t get in the way of your ideas.
Hot Reloading
Edit the code and assets while the game is running and see your changes as soon as you save.
Luau Scripting
Write scripts in Luau, a language identical to Lua, but with optional types to get autocompletion and catch errors when refactoring.
Cross-platform
Vectarine games work on Windows, Linux, macOS and the browser. The export is instant. It’s the perfect choice for itch.io game jams!
Performant
Vectarine is written in Rust and features highly optimized APIs inspired by numpy that can render hundreds of thousands of entities at 60 fps.
Free and Open Source
Vectarine is MIT licensed, allowing you to contribute, and customize the engine to fit your needs while still being able to use it for commercial projects without any restrictions.
Tons of built-in APIs
Vectarine has built-in support for physics, shaders, (potentially infinite) levels, everything you need to make a game without hindering your creativity.
Extendable
Vectarine can be extended with Rust plugins to add even more features.
Collaborative
Vectarine projects are made of text files that can be synced with Git, Dropbox, Syncthing or Google Drive allowing for easy collaboration.
Why Vectarine?
After trying out many game engines and frameworks, I’ve decided to make my own to reduce the friction of making games and prototypes.
Vectarine is a hybrid between a framework and an engine. It has a UI with an editor, asset management, debugging tools but you can still create your game by only writing code if you want to.
Why not Vectarine?
Vectarine might not be the best choice if you are not familiar with coding or hate to code, but it can be a great starting point if you want to learn to code. You will need to program (in Luau) to make games in Vectarine.
Moreover, as Vectarine is a new engine, it doesn’t have many tutorials or plugins. It provides you with the building blocks like drawing to the screen, physics, sound, input and lets you use these block to make the game you want.
Why Vectarine instead of Godot?
Godot is a great engine, but it is UI-driven with a lot of drag-and-drops meaning that you need to learn the interface to work on it. Moreover, its built-in features, regarding collision or tilemaps, push you towards a creative direction that might not fit your vision.
It is a great fit for a lot of games, but you might need to fight the engine if you want to do something truely original gameplay wise.
Vectarine has an interface but can be interacted with code which makes features more discoverable, versionnable and composable while the interface can still be used to manage assets, debug and play the game, edit levels, etc.
You cannot forget you put a game object behind a sprite with an incorrect offset in Vectarine. If you made a mistake at multiple places, you can use Search and Replace to fix it everywhere. In Godot, you would need to open each scene and fix it manually for example.
Why Vectarine instead of Unity?
Unity is a powerful engine, but it suffers from many of the issues of Godot, having a complex UI-driven interface. Moreover, Unity is slow to download, install, launch, start a project and export one. All these actions are instant with Vectarine, making it a much better choice for game jams and quick prototyping.
Because Vectarine allows for low-level interaction through Rust code, it can make better running games compared to Unity.
Why Vectarine instead of Love2D?
Like Love2D, Vectarine uses Lua for scripting, however, it has a built-in editor to manage assets and debug your game making it more productive than Love2D. Moreover, Vectarine uses Luau which provides types and autocompletion for your code making it easier to write and get documentation for your code.
Also, Vectarine has a built-in export to the web allowing you to export your project to itch.io in 3 clicks while Love2D requires third-party tools to do so.
Why Vectarine instead of Roblox?
Like Roblox, Vectarine uses Luau for scripting. Moreover, Vectarine is very greatful to Roblox for open-sourcing the Luau language which is what made Vectarine possible.
Roblox is a popular platform to create and play games, but it is limited to the Roblox ecosystem and has a lot of restrictions on what you can do with it. Roblox games have a specific look and feel that might not fit your vision.
Vectarine allows you to create an publish game to any platform without restrictions.
Gallery
Section titled “Gallery”
The editor is a fully integrated environment to debug code, manage assets, and run your game in real time.
With shaders, you can create real-time point lights and shadows.
A platformer on a spherical world.
Vectarine has built-in support for procedural generation to create infinite worlds.
You can create simple 3D scenes.
A Snake example game, showcasing how fast a game can be prototyped.