The luxe game engine has been in development since at least 2016. Over the years, progress has continued steadily, with development updates shared from time to time through dev logs. Now, it's finally accessible to the public, allowing developers to dive in and start creating.
This is a preview version, so users should expect possible bugs, workflow issues, and an overall lack of polish while the engine continues to evolve toward an official release.
The engine is developed by a studio called Studio Any Percent, which also uses it to create its own titles, including Mossfield Origins and Mossfield Archives.
It follows a unique design philosophy centered on modularity and a tool-driven approach. Instead of aiming to include every possible system a game might need, like other general-purpose engines, luxe focuses on providing a core set of essential functionality. Additional systems and features can then be integrated as needed through the use of modules. This approach allows luxe to remain lean and performant, while also offering the flexibility to adapt to the specific needs of each game being developed.
The luxe engine has been primarily designed for the creation of 2D games but is also 3D capable, featuring an accessible hardware driven renderer that offers great support for shaders, asset pipelines, render paths and more. The developers plan to expand the engine's 3D capabilities once the 2D feature set is complete and polished.
With luxe, developers can build games for Windows, macOS, Linux, and the Web, with console support currently in development.
Built for rapid iteration, and thanks to its modular architecture, the engine can be used with or without its visual editor. This flexibility allows developers to choose their preferred workflow, whether that's a fully code-driven approach or an editor-centric one. At present, luxe leans more toward code-based workflows, as the visual editor is still a work-in-progress and many high-level modules required for editor-driven development are under active development. However, full editor-based game creation is a planned goal for the future.
In terms of features, luxe already provides a robust toolset, including support for text, sprites, tilemaps, and first-class pixel art rendering. It also offers built-in systems for animation, events, input, audio, and 2D physics, with many additional features and improvements currently in development.
Written in C++, luxe uses Wren, a small, fast, and concurrent scripting language, as the primary option for game development. When using Wren with luxe, developers benefit from features like compile-time error checking, full code completion, jump-to-definition, and other developer experience improvements provided by the official Visual Studio Code extension.
Looking ahead, the developers plan to expand support for additional scripting languages that can interface with C. C# support is already in progress, with more options planned for the future. In addition, a visual scripting solution is also under active development.
The engine is available through an interesting pricing model dubbed "Pay-What-You-Should-If-You-Can," meaning it's free to use for evaluation, game jams, students, or in any situation where paying isn't feasible, with a no questions asked policy.
There are four subscription tiers available: Tinkerer, Explorer, Foundation, and Business. The Tinkerer and Explorer plans are intended for individual users and follow the “pay if you can” philosophy. In contrast, the Foundation and Business tiers are geared toward studios, teams, and businesses, with pricing based on revenue levels.
In terms of platform support, luxe runs on Windows, macOS, and several Linux distributions. While not open source, the engine is expected to become source-available soon, with most of the codebase accessible apart from the core, which will follow later.
For more information, be sure to visit the luxe engine website.
