I wish the project the best of luck, but my sincere belief is that is just vapourware. I used the "alpha" a bunch almost 10 years ago (it wasn't called an "alpha" then, and was written in Haxe, and was open source), and my interactions with the author left a sour taste in my mouth, especially how they treated contributors and the community. I'm not surprised to see it is now closed-source.
Luxe is in closed beta so it might be very awesome, and I hope it is, but right now it's only something to keep on the radar.
Wren, however, is a cool little language that has the simplicity of early Python <3.
(I don't mean that it's like Python syntactically, I mean that it's small and nice like scripting languages sometimes are early in their life, and it's pleasant and refreshing.)
I'm in the closed beta. There are some interesting design innovations compared to Godot/Unity. But I don't think I'm allowed to talk about much of it yet ... so I guess you just have to wait until the open beta!
I wouldn't bet on it. They've stated multiple times they intend to eventually provide source-code access, but have always been careful not to call it open-source.
But there doesn't seem to be concrete plans (dates or details) yet, so who knows.
I've been using this for a couple months now and really enjoying it. Here's a couple of things I've built with it:
Gummi Bridges, a game for the LDJAM game jam
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/gummi-bridges
There are some rendering issues with the web build, especially in Chrome. Yes, the sim is very unstable but 1) it was for a game jam 2) it was thematic (the theme was "unstable") so I didn't fix it.
I wrote a Tweening library (similar to DOTween but better), that's available to preview devs.
I also have a 3d project that i'm just doing to figure out the 3D rendering and lighting side of it, this is still a lot less-documented but imho extremely powerful.
My background is gamedev in Unity and custom engines, and using Luxe has been a far better experience for me so far to both of those approaches. It's definitely early days and has some rough edges, and for the 3D stuff is still WIP and I'd say you need a pretty good understanding of 3d engine internals to make use of it.
Some of the best things about it:
- Wren's Fibers make stuff like sequencing and AI scripting so much easier than other engines. I did all the behavior for the little blob gummi's in the ldjam game in about 45 minutes.
- Without getting into too many specifics, the way the project is organized is really well thought out. Many, many things can be edited thru the editor or with human-readable text files, and this makes small changes and version control a lot smoother than something like Unity.
- It scales very well. Despite being "easy to use" and beginner friendly (ish), I have tried throwing huge numbers of objects at it and it does very well, even if they are updating in script. The design is very data-oriented and that really shows in performance.
- Strong Cross platform. I can generate and package up builds for web, linux, windows and mac in under a minute total. And I haven't ran into any platform bugs outside of some stuff on web (which is always difficult).
I'm finishing up my current game which has a semi-custom engine, but I'm planning to use Luxe for future projects. It's definitely got some "early adopter" surprises and doesn't have the level of tutorialization and learning resources as something like unity, but I feel like it's solid enough to support small/medium indie game projects and well on the way to be able to support AAA games. Hopefully the momentum will continue!
