Show HN: C# Game Engine with its own scripting language and IDE

comments (10)

• Wow, my post suddenly went viral! Just opened GitHub a few minutes ago, and saw +17 stars on my project from the last few hours... Anyway, i see a lot of people asking WHY making ky own engine or language. So the main answer is: for fun. it's clearly not going to be even close to a professional engine like godot/unity/modern gamemaker, but this is mine, and the others aren't :) But i wrote more about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/1tmcg6j/my_biggest_...

  am-gm 1d ago

• This is a massive undertaking... building a whole language + IDE + engine from scratch is insane. I am curious: what made you go with a custom language instead of just embedding Lua or something? Was it a learning thing, or do you think Exp brings something Lua (or GML) doesn't?

  h2aichat 1d ago

• The inspiration on GameMaker is clear and very much appreciated.

  Can the IDE run on other OSes besides Windows? You seem to be using WinForms.I tried building it and running through Wine, but it didn't work.

  Congrats on the project, making an IDE is no easy task. I believe there's room for a game engine to offer what GameMaker 8.1 used to (near instant runs, extremely fast iteration time for 2D games).

  Altern4tiveAcc 1d ago

• I've also been making a game engine based on MonoGame (and prime31/Nez), and one thing I recommend looking into is headless mode for both the game and the editor. I started my engine in the first place because I want to get back into gamedev, but there's no way I'm going back to the convoluted editor-centered workflow of Unity/Godot. And with proper MVVM, you can get the game headless too, so agents can play without the UI and run thousands of simulations of the gameplay.

  Overall, MVVM should be getting a renaissance because of how well it determines the layers and data flow for AI. I have multiple projects using it, and even in early 2025, models had almost no issues understanding my code and implementing new features. Now I set up MVVM-inspired headless architectures including for Swift or React Native projects and it works like a charm.

  ivm 1d ago

• It seems for me fundamentally wrong to use C# to write some scripting language, since C# itself is pretty high-level and is used widely for scripting (like in Unity).

  Panzerschrek 12h ago

• > The engine and IDE themselves are written in C#, but the language you use inside ArcadeMaker to program your games is my custom language, not C#.

  Is there a plugin system that allows me to code in C#? (Or F#, or perhaps any of the other dotnet scripting languages?) I'd prefer to avoid a new language if possible.

  gwbas1c 1d ago

• Owning the language, IDE, and engine might actually be the interesting part here. The question is what workflow that lets you build that would be awkward or impossible in Godot/GameMaker. If you find that, you probably find the project's killer feature too.

  kiops 1d ago

• We are reaching levels of based that shouldn't even be possible.

  FLeXMurphy 1d ago

• I think if you're looking for other people to use your game engine, it helps to have one killer feature. I'm not clear what yours is at this point. Even if your killer feature is not something you have yet completely implemented, but it is simply a long-term goal, I think it is worth listing that front and center.

  BSTRhino 1d ago

• looking for open source game engines lately, this is soooo cool :)

  wingardium 1d ago