The Brick Engine

The Brick Engine is a fast, powerful, cross-platform, TOTALLY FREE 2D game engine. If you'd like to make video games quickly and easily, written in the language of your choice, and distribute them to a wide variety of platforms, read on. And if you'd like to see Brick Engine in action right away, head on over to the games and demos pages.

The latest stable release, v5.3, is out as of February 19th, 2011.

From the blog:

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Fossil history (engine):

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Fossil history (bindings):

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With this engine, you get the basics like:

• tile-based maps and sprites (and both can be animated)
• text strings (with loadable fonts)
• collision detection (with both bounding box and pixel-accurate resolution)
• introspection of sprites and maps (e.g., sprites can determine their position)
• sound and song playback (from disk files or memory buffers)
• input management

The Brick Engine is endian-clean, has been tested on three major architectures (x86, PPC, and ARM), and has been built on Linux, Mac OS X (Intel and PPC), OpenBSD, NetBSD, and MS-Windows. It's also got SIMD-optimized rendering and OpenGL-based acceleration where the hardware supports it.

The Brick Engine also contains some unique and fun stuff:

• Split-screen views and viewports at no cost
• Graphics filters (including brightness- and contrast-adjusting frames, convolution kernels, color-replacement lookup, and more) that can be added to any sprite or tile
• Sprite frame composition (so you can layer multiple effects in a single sprite)
• A unique “motion control program” system that lets you write tiny sprite-control programs in a simple language, making it possible to give your sprites a degree of autonomy (great when you're writing your game in an interpreted–and possibly slow–scripting language and you need to control hundreds or possibly thousands of sprites, e.g. running particle systems or environmental effects)
• Timed event scheduling (events running each in separate threads)
• Bindings for an ever-growing number of languages
• It's also MIT-licensed TOTALLY FREE software! Proprietary games, GPL'd software, shareware? Go nuts!

There's extensive API documentation for the engine itself, and an ongoing series of tutorials on the blog. If you're curious to know how it's all put together, start with the overview. If you just want to get started, look for your language of choice in the top nav and hit the link to begin.

Enjoy!

Steve