ArcadeMaker
Open-source 2D game engine with its own scripting language and a GameMaker-style built-in IDE.
🔗 Visit ArcadeMaker
Description
Making a 2D game usually means either learning a big general-purpose engine like Unity or Godot, or paying for GameMaker's license once your project outgrows the free tier. ArcadeMaker is an attempt to recreate that old-school GameMaker 8 experience — a drag-and-drop-friendly workflow, a built-in code editor, and a simple scripting language made for games — but as a free, open-source project anyone can build and extend.
ArcadeMaker is a cross-platform 2D game engine built in C# on top of MonoGame, paired with its own interpreted scripting language called Exp and an integrated development environment modeled on GameMaker 8's editor. It targets desktop, mobile, and console builds, with web support planned. It's MIT-licensed and still early-stage — some IDE features are ahead of what the engine backend currently supports, so it's best suited to hobbyists comfortable with an in-progress tool rather than teams needing a production-ready pipeline today.
💬 Our review
The short version: if GameMaker 8's beginner-friendly workflow is what got you into game development and you'd rather not pay for a modern GameMaker license, ArcadeMaker recreates that experience for free and lets you poke around in the source code, which is worth a look if you're patient with rough edges.
Against Godot, which is also free and open source but has a much larger community, a more finished engine, and years of production use behind it, ArcadeMaker is clearly the less mature option — its IDE already has features the engine can't fully back yet. Against paid GameMaker or Unity, the appeal is purely the price and the GameMaker-8-style workflow nostalgia. For a hobby project, or for someone who wants to contribute to a young open-source engine, it's a reasonable pick; for anything you plan to ship, Godot or GameMaker remain the safer bet today.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
MIT, gratuit — projet en développement actif, fonctionnalités IDE en avance sur le moteur
Pros
gratuit et open source (MIT)
workflow familier pour les habitués de GameMaker 8
langage de script dédié (Exp) + IDE intégré
cross-platform visé (desktop, mobile, console)
Cons
projet jeune / early-stage, certaines fonctions IDE pas encore supportées par le moteur
communauté et documentation limitées comparé à Godot/Unity
support web pas encore disponible (prévu)