My biggest C# project: Game engine with its own scripting language & IDE

ER — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:18:11 +0000

GitHub repo
(first of all, i want to say that I made this project for fun and challenge. I always wanted to create my own language. This has no business goal or something.)

So the project is a 2D game engine (MonoGame backend) inspired by GameMaker 8. It includes its own IDE (built with WinForms) and an interpreted programming language that I wrote myself.

The language—definitely the biggest challenge in the project—is a simple dynamically typed language. When I started, I had zero knowledge of how to build something like this. I didn’t even know I was making an interpreter; at first I called it a compiler. It was a personal challenge, and I wanted to figure everything out without using any resources or tutorials. My mindset was basically: “I need to write software that takes a text file containing code and just does what it says.”

Somehow, I made it work. In the beginning, running an empty loop counting to 1M took 7 seconds. After a lot of performance work and rebuilding parts of the system, the same machine can now run a 30M loop in 2–3 seconds. Pretty nice improvement.

The language itself is a bit unusual, and I want to share one small feature I really like: loop counters.

foreach item in ['a', 'b', 'c'] : counter c
{
   println(c + ": " + item)
} 
// Output: 
// 0: a 
// 1: b 
// 2: c

Not a complicated feature, but pretty useful.

Anyway, these days I barely have time to work on the project, so I decided to open-source it. I’m hoping people here will find it interesting and help turn it into something real.

Would love to get feedback! 🙂

A YouTube video showing a little game I made with the engine

Open Source Game Engine with its Own Programming Language

ER — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:33:27 +0000

I've made a prototype game engine that has its own IDE and programming language. It's based on GameMaker8 and has a MonoGame backend engine.
Look at this little game i made with the engine:

Full source on GitHub: https://github.com/ArcadeMakerSources/ArcadeMaker

Would love to get some feedback here🙂

DEV Community: ER

My biggest C# project: Game engine with its own scripting language & IDE

Open Source Game Engine with its Own Programming Language