Code-Centric Game Engines

I have playing with Godot on and off for a while. Recently, decided to try the First 2D Game tutorial. Code-wise it was easy to follow, but there is too much interaction with GUI and if you miss-click, it is really hard to debug it.

As a programmer, I prefer text over GUI, I wondered if there are any text or code centric game engines. After some web search and AI discussions, here are some promising code-centric game engines frameworks.

LOVE/Love2d

This is the oldest, stable, open source, with largest community text-based game engine. It has no builtin text editor, so you are free to use any you like. It lacks some stuff like physics. But since it has been around for a long time, it has a lot of libraries that provide missing functionalities.

It uses Lua language which is a popular language in modding community.

It also seems to get a lot of love on HackerNews.

DragonRuby

DragonRuby is a closed-source, commercial game engine. It is another code-centric engine with no GUI. I really like that it uses Ruby since I use same at the work. It can also publish your games on Steam, App & Play stores, even supports Oculus Quest.

Bevy

Bevy is the youngest, open source, capable of both 2D and 3D games, text-based engine. It uses Rust, that is an exciting language.

It is still in 0.x.x version, so it maybe not as stable. Smaller community as well.

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