I open-sourced my Steam game, 100% written in Lua, engine is also open
Details
- External ID
- 47282225
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I open-sourced my Steam game, 100% written in Lua, engine is also open
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 65
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8640836408364083
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Homebrew engine https://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer utilities and gaming mods
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- lua-based game engine and game
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building both an entire custom game engine from scratch and a full commercial-grade game released on Steam requires deep graphics programming, audio pipelines, cross-platform low-level systems, and game design.
What it would actually take: The stack involves a custom C or C++ game engine exposing a Lua scripting runtime, handling OpenGL/Vulkan rendering, spatial audio, physics, and input handling. The hardest challenges are low-level engine architecture (memory management, frame timing, cross-platform platform abstraction) and authoring complete game mechanics, animations, and assets. Deep systems engineering and game engine development expertise are essential.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Balatro (Lua/Love2D game example), Love2D game engine
Concerns raised: Source code not properly documented without README, Misuse of 'open source' term - actually source-available under copyright, Source code trivial to extract from Steam installation, No clear documentation on how to run or understand the code
Feature requests: Add README.md with proper documentation, Add LICENSE file to repository, High-level explanation of code functionality
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 69 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #19 of 70 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 109 days after the earliest competitor.
- My biggest solo-project: Game engine with its own programming language · hn · 2026-05-25 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Game Engine in Julia with 400KB Exports (Vs Unity's 200MB) · hn · 2026-02-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I made a 2D Lua game engine using Rust with code and asset live reload · hn · 2026-05-19 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I'm writing an alternative to Lutris · hn · 2026-01-22 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Homegames. An open-source game platform I've been making for 8 years · hn · 2026-07-05 · 229 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Millennium · hn · 2026-08-14 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Fio: 3D World editor/game engine · hn · 2026-03-26 · 96 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- browser-game-engine · github · 2026-09-24 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.