LÖVE

And here's another game engine! This particular discovery is thanks to the wonderful Oh My Giraffe game. If you've not tried the game itself, grab it now. It's a beautiful 2D game that has you playing a hungry giraffe that has to stretch its neck to grab fruit hanging off lots of vines, while at the same time being chased by even hungrier lions. The game is free but not open source, and I'm mentioning it here because it was built using LÖVE, an open source 2D game framework that's almost as awesome as the game itself. The great thing about LÖVE is that it's straightforward and doesn't require too much learning, unlike something like Unity. To play some music, for example, the syntax is as simple as creating a function that executes sound = love.audio.newSource("music.ogg"), and other functions are equally easy to understand.

All of this code is wrapped within the Lua programming language. As this language is in common use within the games industry, especially when it comes to add-ons or scripting levels, there's a good chance people will already be familiar with its use, and the demographic is perfect when asking for help. Fortunately, as LÖVE is itself open source, so too are many of the games that have been developed with it. This means you can download the code and the assets, run the game, and take a look at how everything is put together. The documentation for LÖVE is a little short on the basics, especially when it comes to making a very simple entry point, which makes the many other projects using LÖVE much more useful. But the results speak for themselves. When you see the animations Oh My Giraffe is capable of, and know that the game was created within this same environment, you just want to have a go.

Project Website

https://love2d.org/

Write a game on Linux and easily move it to Windows, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS.