IceBoxEngine
A downloadable IceBoxEngine for Windows, macOS, and Linux
IceBoxEngine
The 2D engine built to ship games.
Beta · in active development
A cross-platform 2D game engine by IceBoxCrew, written in modern C++26 — with a renderer built like a modern 3D one. You get the whole kit: a project launcher, a full visual editor, an auto-updater, and a lightweight runtime that ships inside your game. Build anything from crisp pixel art to 4K HD 2D, then release it on six platforms.
Develop on
Windows · Linux · macOS
Ship to
Windows · Linux · macOS · Android · iOS · Web
Script with
Lua, visual node graphs, Python tooling
Editor requirements: Windows 10+, Ubuntu 22.04+ / Debian 12+ or macOS 11+ · dual-core CPU · 4 GB RAM · 512 MB VRAM · 5–10 GB of disk space.
Renderers, per platform
| Windows | OpenGL 3.3 / 4.6 · Vulkan 1.1–1.4 |
| Linux | OpenGL 3.3 / 4.6 · Vulkan 1.1–1.4 |
| macOS | Metal (ANGLE · MoltenVK) |
| iOS | Metal (MoltenVK) |
| Android | OpenGL ES 3.0 / 3.2 · Vulkan 1.1–1.4 |
| Web | WebGL 2.0 · WebGPU |
Everything in the box
Rendering & FX
A render-graph pipeline that batches thousands of sprites per draw call, a node-based material editor, particle FX, and a single backend-agnostic RHI, so the same game code runs on every renderer listed above.
Lighting & post FX
Lights with texture cookies, real-time 2D shadows ray-cast from colliders or the traced outline of your artwork, optional hardware ray-traced global illumination, and a post stack — bloom, ACES tonemapping, depth of field, SSAO, SSR, volumetric fog, grading — blended from volumes you place in the level.
Scenes & ECS
An EnTT entity-component-system with reusable entity classes and inheritance, a level outliner, world & property editors, and content that hot-reloads while the editor is open.
2D Physics
Box2D v3 on a fixed timestep with a multithreaded solver: joints that break, ragdolls and bone physics, one-way platforms, collision generated straight from sprites and tilemaps, and objects that shatter into real debris.
Sprites, tiles & animation
Sprite editor and spritesheet slicer, dedicated tilemap and tileset editors, flipbooks driven by animation state machines, Spine-style skeletal rigs with IK and per-bone physics, and a timeline cinema editor for cutscenes.
Lua or visual scripting
Write Lua with an integrated debugger and breakpoints, or wire node graphs that compile down to exactly the same Lua — pick the mode when you create the project. Python automates the editor itself.
Audio, video & UI
Spatial audio with per-sound filters, EQ, delay and reverb, WAV / MP3 / OGG Vorbis / FLAC / Opus playback with streamed music, FFmpeg video, and a widget editor with full Unicode text shaping and right-to-left support.
Multiplayer & AI
Split-screen for four, plus host-authoritative online play over UDP or WebSocket with automatic replication, prediction, lag compensation, rollback netcode, encrypted packets and voice chat — and behavior trees, perception and A* navigation for everyone else.
Tooling that ships with it
Profiling & debugging
A frame profiler with a CPU flame timeline, per-render-pass GPU timings and VRAM tracking, Tracy integration, live statistics overlays, and a developer console with commands and CVars.
Remote Preview
Stream Play mode straight to an Android phone over USB and drive it with real touch, accelerometer and gyroscope input — no full build required.
One-click builds
Build Game targets all six platforms: cooked assets, zstd-packed content, SHA-256 manifests, NSIS and .deb installers, macOS .dmg / .pkg, DLC packs, and headless dedicated servers.
Plugins & mods
Extend the editor and the runtime with native C++ plugins built against the Plugin SDK, or ship mods made of Lua and content that need no compiler at all.
Localization
Your game's text lives in a localization asset with {}-style format arguments and automatic right-to-left handling for Arabic and Hebrew — and it reloads the moment you save it.
Documentation
Nine reference documents in English and Russian — editor, graphics, engine internals, assets, building, plugins, and the complete Lua and Python APIs — searchable inside the editor.
The editor speaks 14 languages
The editor, the project launcher and the updater are all fully localized, and the whole interface mirrors itself for right-to-left scripts:
English Русский Українська 中文 العربية हिन्दी Español Português 日本語 Français Deutsch Italiano Polski עברית
Licensing, honestly
IceBoxEngine is a paid, proprietary engine — but its license is written for people who actually want to ship games:
Sell what you make, royalty-free
Build, publish, and sell the games you create with IceBoxEngine — commercial releases included — with no royalties, no revenue share, and no per-title fees.
Your games stay yours
You own everything you create: your source code, assets, and content are yours alone. IceBoxCrew claims no ownership of your projects.
Activated offline, once
Your key activates the engine on your computer without ever contacting a licensing server, and the activation survives reinstalls and engine updates. The games you ship carry no license check at all.
One honest catch
The engine itself stays proprietary — IceBoxCrew develops and owns IceBoxEngine — so you may not resell or redistribute the engine on its own. Everything you build with it is fair game.
Purchase
In order to download this IceBoxEngine you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $24.99 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Download demo
Development log
- IceBoxEngine - RoadMap to Release-1.0.01 day ago
