MYTHOS Game Engine

A lightweight framework for 2D video games on low-end Windows and Linux PCs.
It's small and fast in the right hands, with a laser-focus on being extensible and portable.
MYTHOS should feel like a game engine you wrote for yourself.

Tranquility in simplicity. Because less is more.
Start with what you need. You'll be thankful you did.

Features
Direct and flexible cross-platform rendering. Powered by Allegro and Mojoshader, the platform-specifics are all taken care of for you. But MYTHOS is not a rendering engine! How your game looks is completely under your control. Vector graphics? Sprites? 3D models in a 2D game? Why shoehorn them into a full 3D engine when you can do it simply?	Built-in background music system that can play both tracker modules and PCM streams. The underlying libxmp backend is under the developer's control and MYTHOS takes care of the resource management. Reactive music scores and compact file sizes are made easy. A wide variety of encoding formats for music streams are optionally supported.
Collision detection routines for convex hitboxes, built specifically for high-performance arcade games. You can use polygons, radials and single points. Optimization controls include bitmasking, adjustable hitrates, and you can even disable parts of the algorithm entirely.	Eccentric hardware friendly. MYTHOS is ready to change shape. Game logic requires integers only, so that you can port MYTHOS to really old hardware and your game will keep its fast, predictable behavior. LUTs for slow math are included. MYTHOS itself requires an FPU out of the box for rendering and depends on modern libraries. Porting, while easy, will still require manual effort on your part.
Integrated with PhysicsFS for smaller download sizes, easy DLC and patch distribution, and resource pack management. PhysicsFS is a virtual filesystem driver that can mount compressed folders in a lot of formats, and even mount new files on top of old ones.	All the other little things that make MYTHOS nice to use. A detailed beginners manual, simple helpers for deterministic pseudo-RNG, configuration parsing, vertex manipulation, and a nice command line interface a la Quake that you can use to add and call your own debugging commands.
It's small. The engine core is only a few thousand lines long. The entirety of MYTHOS can reasonably be understood in an afternoon. External libraries are used moderately, mostly the standard library. MYTHOS itself operates much like a library in practice, and can be combined or extended to do anything.	It's free and open source, under a permissive license. We'll never extort you after you've released your game. We don't care what you do with it, how much money you make, or even if you don't give something back. We would appreciate your donations or contributions, though.

Features

Direct and flexible cross-platform rendering. Powered by Allegro and Mojoshader, the platform-specifics are all taken care of for you. But MYTHOS is not a rendering engine! How your game looks is completely under your control. Vector graphics? Sprites? 3D models in a 2D game? Why shoehorn them into a full 3D engine when you can do it simply?

Built-in background music system that can play both tracker modules and PCM streams. The underlying libxmp backend is under the developer's control and MYTHOS takes care of the resource management. Reactive music scores and compact file sizes are made easy. A wide variety of encoding formats for music streams are optionally supported.

Collision detection routines for convex hitboxes, built specifically for high-performance arcade games. You can use polygons, radials and single points. Optimization controls include bitmasking, adjustable hitrates, and you can even disable parts of the algorithm entirely.

Eccentric hardware friendly. MYTHOS is ready to change shape. Game logic requires integers only, so that you can port MYTHOS to really old hardware and your game will keep its fast, predictable behavior. LUTs for slow math are included.
MYTHOS itself requires an FPU out of the box for rendering and depends on modern libraries. Porting, while easy, will still require manual effort on your part.

Integrated with PhysicsFS for smaller download sizes, easy DLC and patch distribution, and resource pack management. PhysicsFS is a virtual filesystem driver that can mount compressed folders in a lot of formats, and even mount new files on top of old ones.

All the other little things that make MYTHOS nice to use. A detailed beginners manual, simple helpers for deterministic pseudo-RNG, configuration parsing, vertex manipulation, and a nice command line interface a la Quake that you can use to add and call your own debugging commands.

It's small. The engine core is only a few thousand lines long. The entirety of MYTHOS can reasonably be understood in an afternoon. External libraries are used moderately, mostly the standard library. MYTHOS itself operates much like a library in practice, and can be combined or extended to do anything.

It's free and open source, under a permissive license. We'll never extort you after you've released your game. We don't care what you do with it, how much money you make, or even if you don't give something back. We would appreciate your donations or contributions, though.

Ready to get started?

We expect to have the first beta version ready in 2026. We'll update this page with links to the instruction manual and the source code when it's available to try.

If you have further questions, please mail them to: bonkmaykr@canithesis.org.