Moai SDK: the Lua Game Engine Behind Broken Age, and Where It Stands Now

For a few years in the early 2010s, Moai was the answer for a particular kind of studio: small, ambitious, tired of writing the same mobile plumbing twice. You got a C++ core you could embed anywhere and Lua on top for everything else, and you shipped to iOS and Android from one codebase. Double Fine used it for Broken Age. Klei used it for Invisible, Inc. Harebrained Schemes built a number-one iPad game on it in twelve weeks.

Then it stopped. This page gives you three things the rest of the web does not: a dated answer on whether the project is still maintained — taken from the repository’s own commit history rather than guessed at — a verified list of what was actually built with it, and the Lua engines worth moving to. It also corrects a piece of trivia this very page got wrong for years.

Table of Contents

• What Is Moai SDK?
• Is Moai SDK Still Maintained?
• Can You Still Download and Build It?
• Games Built With Moai SDK
• What Moai Got Right
• Why It Faded
• What to Use Instead
• Key Takeaways
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Conclusion

What Is Moai SDK?

Moai SDK is a free, open-source game engine written in C++ and scripted in Lua, built by the Seattle startup Zipline Games and released as a public beta in July 2011. It was designed to be embeddable and deliberately low-level: a toolkit you assemble rather than an editor you open. Released under the CPAL licence, it ran on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux and HTML5. Its last recorded commit landed on 14 June 2020.

A note on the name, since this page previously got it wrong: “moai” is a Rapa Nui word, not a Spanish one. It refers to the monolithic human figures carved on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), where the statues are treated as sacred and as a source of mana. The Spanish for “statue” is estatua. The engine is named after the statues; the language attribution was simply an error, and it has been corrected.

Is Moai SDK Still Maintained?

No — and unlike most “is it dead” answers, this one has dates attached. We checked the repositories directly rather than relying on impressions:

• The main repository’s last commit was 14 June 2020 (“fixed bug in material mgr named globals loading”), on the develop branch. Before that, activity is sparse: three commits in June 2020, one in April 2020, three in December 2019.
• The README already said the project was unsupported. Patrick Meehan changed it in November 2017 to state that “There’s no official support for the project right now” and to point people at the forums or a Slack invite. That text is still there today.
• The community repositories are colder than the main one. moai-community, created to hold community tooling, last saw a commit in January 2019. The Moaiforge fork’s develop branch stopped in October 2015.
• getmoai.com has been down since 2018, and Zipline Games is listed as defunct by company trackers.

That last point matters for anyone reading the refresh brief’s assumption: Moai is not community-maintained. It is a well-preserved archive with an active issue list nobody is closing — 161 open issues at the time of writing, and no tagged releases at all. If you want the polite version, the project’s own principal developer gave it years ago, advising anyone not prepared to maintain the engine themselves to “think seriously about going with a commercial engine or authoring tool instead.”

Can You Still Download and Build It?

Yes. The source is public on GitHub under the CPAL licence, and nothing stops you cloning it today. When we checked in August 2026 the repository showed 963 stars, 312 forks and 7,166 commits of history.

What you should expect is a build project from 2020, not a product. The repository ships reference projects for Xcode, Android Studio and Visual Studio 2019, plus CMake for Android and HTML5, and its stated goal is a one-step build with vendored dependencies. But it targets the OpenGL ES era and the mobile toolchains of that time, there are no releases to download, and there is nobody to file a bug with. We did not attempt a clean 2026 build, and found no published report of one.

Games Built With Moai SDK

The Invisible, Inc. entry deserves the qualifier. Klei’s Jason Dreger described the studio as using “a heavily modified version of the MOAI game engine”, with designers working mostly in Lua and artists exporting from Flash through a custom pipeline. That is the pattern across this list: Moai was a starting point that studios changed to suit themselves, which is exactly what an unopinionated, embeddable SDK invites. The project never tried to centralise that work either — it shipped no project generator and no IDE templates, and pointed users at community-maintained extensions instead.

What Moai Got Right

Moai’s design brief reads well even now. The C++ core did the work; Lua did the deciding. Because the engine was built to be embedded — dropped into another program, or used as an overlay inside an existing app — it never assumed it owned your process, which is rare among game engines then and now.

The trade-off was deliberate and the project said so plainly: Moai does not hide low-level graphics concepts, and expects you to understand coordinate systems and shaders. Its documentation aimed at convenience, flexibility and power rather than simplicity. For a studio with strong engineers and a taste for Lua, that was the appeal. For a solo beginner, it was the reason to pick something else.

Why It Faded

The business model is the interesting part, and the lesson generalises. Zipline gave the SDK away and planned to earn from Moai Cloud — hosted leaderboards, multiplayer, storage, free until your traffic grew. The engine attracted more than 6,000 developers during the beta, according to Zipline’s own 2012 announcement, and flagship games shipped on it. The revenue did not follow. Meehan said publicly that the SDK had paid him nothing to date, even as studios with eight-figure funding shipped flagship titles on it — and the open-source half of the strategy went on to outlive the commercial half by exactly as long as his spare time allowed.

What to Use Instead

If you liked Moai’s shape — Lua on top, small runtime, mobile-first — the successors are healthy:

• Defold is the closest fit. Lua scripting with a C++ core, native extensions in C and C++, exports to mobile, desktop, HTML5 and consoles, and it is genuinely active: version 1.12.4, from the Defold Foundation, was the current release when we checked in August 2026.
• LÖVE is the framework-not-engine option, zlib-licensed and Lua-scripted, for 2D work where you want to assemble your own structure — much the same instinct that drew people to Moai.
• Solar2D, the open-source continuation of Corona SDK, keeps the Lua-plus-mobile combination with a gentler on-ramp.

Two engines already covered here are worth a look for different reasons. If the mobile-2D-in-C++ part was the draw, our guide to the Cocos2d family is the direct comparison — and it carries a cautionary parallel, since Cocos2d-x went through its own deprecation. If you would rather not bet on a niche runtime again, Godot is the free, actively developed default with a much larger community. Choosing between them is really a language question, which our guide to the best programming languages for game development unpacks.

Key Takeaways

• Moai SDK is a C++ engine scripted in Lua, released by Zipline Games as a public beta in July 2011 and licensed under CPAL.
• It is dormant. The repository’s last recorded commit was 14 June 2020, on the develop branch, and the README has said there is no official support since November 2017.
• It is not community-maintained either — the community repository stopped in January 2019 and the best-known fork in 2015.
• The verified game list is short but real: Crimson: Steam Pirates, Wolf Toss, The Moron Test, Broken Age and Invisible, Inc. — the last on a heavily modified fork.
• The name comes from Rapa Nui, not Spanish. Earlier versions of this page said otherwise.
• The source is still public and buildable in principle, but there are no releases, 161 open issues and nobody maintaining it.
• For new work, Defold is the closest live equivalent; LÖVE and Solar2D cover the lighter end.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Moai is a good example of a specific kind of failure: not a bad engine, but a good engine whose business model never funded its maintenance. The technology did what it promised — studios shipped real games on it, one of them an iPad chart-topper built in twelve weeks — and the code is still sitting there, readable and complete, under an open licence.

What it cannot give you now is a maintainer. If you inherited a Moai project, the honest plan is to budget for owning the engine yourself or to port; if you are choosing fresh, choose something with releases this year. For the wider landscape of what is still active, our directory of 100+ C and C++ game engines sorts the alternatives by category.