Toy Engine–Thin C++ Game Engine Released

The Toy Engine was just released yesterday.  The Toy Engine is a cross platform modular C++ open source game engine currently available under the GPL license.  The engine is quite young so you should expect some instability and missing features.  The developer @HugoAM has been very responsive to feedback and has announced that the license will be changed to something more permissive in time.  The source code is available now on GitHub.

The guiding design principals behind the Toy engine are:

  • simple and lightweight, simplicity is the core aim and philosophy behind toy. the codebase is about one-tenth the size of competing engines, and toy is so light, the whole editor runs in your browser !
  • modular, each functionality is enclosed in a small, simple, easy to understand code building block. most of these blocks lie in the underlying mud library.
  • extensible, as a collection of modules, toy is a perfect fit to build your own game technology, keeping full control over the components you use, the application design and the control flow.
  • game code first, toy is first and foremost meant to build games in native c++ code, in direct contact with the core systems. this allows for much greater control than typical scripting in-engine.
  • versatile, toy is designed from the start with complex games in mind, such as strategy or role playing games, by giving full control over its powerful user interface and rendering systems.
  • zero-cost tools, reflection automatically extends your game core code for seamless scripting, editing, inspection of your game objects, types and procedures in the built-in tools/editor.
  • educative, toy aims to provide simplest technical solutions to typical game programming problems, easily studied and understood, hoping to be a driver of education on game development topics.
  • fast iteration, coupling seamless bindings of both built-in systems and game code to various scripting languages, hot-reload of native code, and immediate UI and rendering, toy provides fast iteration speeds.

The Toy engine is built upon the underlying mud framework, which provides the low level cross platform functionality that toy is built on top of.  The mud framework is built on the much better ZLib open source license.  You can compile Toy on both Windows and Linux.  Toy games can be run on most modern platforms including mobile, desktops and even HTML via EMScripten.  The video embedded below demonstrates how to get started using Visual Studio 2017.

Scroll to Top