I made a 2D Lua game engine using Rust with code and asset live reload
Details
- External ID
- 48198462
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I made a 2D Lua game engine using Rust with code and asset live reload
- Website domain
- usagiengine.com
- Launched
- May 19, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 30
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7988691437802908
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I love making small 2D pixel art games, especially using tools that have some constraints. Things like Pico-8 and the Playdate SDK are simple, fun, and allow for focusing on the game idea rather than the technical minutia. Years ago I prototyped an idea for this little game engine, Usagi, but used Rhai instead of Lua. The idea for this little game engine never went away, so I decided to finally dig in and build it.Today I released v1.0.0 of Usagi Engine after making a bunch of small games, getting feedback from developers, and stabilizing the API. It's simple, has a great developer experience (CLI-based, init template, Lua plugin integration, and cross-platform export for web, Linux, macOS, and Windows with a single command).The engine is public domain, and its source is on GitHub (linked from the website).Rust was a great fit for this project due to its stability and tooling. The crate ecosystem is a real highlight for me. Plus clippy. I made a couple of games in Rust in the past (using Macroquad) which prepared me for this project. But for Usagi I decided to go with Raylib for it's maturity. Usagi is using sola-raylib, the Rust bindings for C Raylib with some Rust-y wrappings. I maintain these bindings, which also was a big help to be familiar with what's possible with Raylib.The well known tools that are similar are Pico-8, Picotron, Love2D, and DragonRuby Game Toolkit. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. I think Usagi fits in a little spot amongst them where it's free, open source, and has a much more modern developer experience.Now that the engine is v1.0.0, I'm going to focus my energy on making games with it, writing a book of tutorials, and creating video screencasts. I love sharing what I learn and helping people make their games.I'd love it if you checked the engine out, and I'm looking forward to seeing what people make.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- 2d game engine in rust with live reload
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Writing a bespoke 2D game engine in Rust with embedded Lua runtimes, graphics pipelines, hot-reloading state preservation, and memory management requires deep systems programming and engine architecture knowledge.
What it would actually take: Requires a Rust stack integrating wgpu/OpenGL for 2D batched sprite rendering, an embedded Lua runtime (such as mlua), and file-watching crates (notify) tied to hot code/asset reload architectures. The hardest part is preserving and migrating game state safely across Lua script reloads while managing resource lifetimes and frame timing without memory leaks. This demands expertise in low-level graphics programming, language bindings, and systems architecture.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 168 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #50 of 169 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 197 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Moongate · hn · 2026-03-06 · 287 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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