Marmalade SDK: The Cross-Platform C++ Mobile Engine and What Happened to It
Marmalade let studios ship one C++ game to every mobile platform, then vanished. Here’s how it worked, which games used it, and why you can’t use it in 2026.
Game Development
MT Framework: Capcom’s Engine Before RE Engine — and the Games It Still Ships
Capcom turned down Unreal and built its own engine instead. Here’s every MT Framework version and what ran on it, why RE Engine replaced it, and why it was still shipping games in 2025.
Moai SDK: the Lua Game Engine Behind Broken Age, and Where It Stands Now
Moai gave indie studios a C++ core with Lua on top, and powered several notable games before development stopped. Here’s the verified status — including the date of the last commit — and the Lua engines to move to.
Lumberyard – Free Game Engine
Lumberyard is a free, cross-platform 3D game engine developed by Amazon Game Tech. It is based upon Crytek’s Cryengine. This AAA game engine is written in C++ and Lua. Lumberyard develops games for the PC, Mobiles and consoles i.e., Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The most prominent feature of the engine is its integration with AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Twitch. Lumberyard is designed for performance, modularity, and productivity.
Limon Engine – A 3D Game Engine that’s just enough
Limon Engine is an open source, multi-platform and multi-threaded, 3D game engine. The engine is written in C++ and specially designed for First Person Shooter Games. It develops games for the platforms of Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac-OS. It is a self-contained, simple learning project, has clean code and fair amount of functionalities. It is a great platform for learning game development. The engine is licensed under free LG-PL (Lesser General Public License).
id Tech Game Engines — Complete History from Doom to id Tech 8
id Tech built the FPS genre: Doom, Quake, and thirty years of Carmack-grade engineering, now at id Tech 8. Every version, every game, all in one place.
Leadwerks –An Easy way to build 3D Games
Leadwerks is a cross-platform, 3D game engine developed by Leadwerks Software to make 3D video game easy to develop. It is written in C++, C-Objective and Lua. It develops games for the platform of Microsoft windows and Linux. It is a proprietary engine. On March, 2019 its first stable version was released. Until now four versions of the engine have been released.
Jade Engine: the Ubisoft Engine Behind Beyond Good & Evil and the Sands of Time
Ubisoft Montpellier built Jade for one game and named it after its heroine. It ended up carrying the Prince of Persia reboot. Here’s every game verified on it — and why the Beyond Good & Evil sequel isn’t one.
IW Engine — The Game Engine Behind Call of Duty
The IW Engine has powered nearly every Call of Duty for two decades. Here’s how it evolved from id Tech 3 into the technology behind the franchise.
Irrlicht Engine: The Open-Source C++ 3D Engine, Its Forks, and Its Status in 2026
Irrlicht is a small, open-source C++ 3D engine that still runs inside Luanti and SuperTuxKart. Here’s what it includes, a working example, and whether to use it in 2026.
HPL Engine: Frictional’s Horror Engine From Penumbra to Amnesia: The Bunker
Two of HPL’s three generations are on GitHub under GPLv3. The one powering SOMA and Amnesia: The Bunker is not. Here’s the split, the verified game list, and what you can actually build with it.
Horde3D – Next Generation Graphic Engine
Horde3D is small, open Source and cross platform game engine. This 3D rendering engine is written in C++. It targets the platform of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Its C-style exposed API interface allows user to use it from any language possible with less effort. It thus, offers the bindings to C#, Java, Python, Lua, Go and many other languages.