Open-source game repos — filtered for commercial use, active development, and real quality.
# |
Repository |
Engine |
License |
Stars |
Language |
Score |
Updated |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
GameDevHub is a filterable index of open-source game-development repositories on GitHub, built for indie developers who keep hitting the same wall. Most repository lists online are either enormous unsorted “awesome” lists with no quality signal, or hand-curated lists that have not been touched in years and are now full of dead links and ambiguous licenses. This catalog layers license, engine, activity and quality filters over live GitHub data so you can find projects that are still maintained and clearly licensed.
Every repository is scored from 0 to 100 on a small set of mechanical signals, and only those above a minimum threshold are shown. The score is deliberately boring: it does not try to judge whether a project is “good”, only whether it is in good enough shape to be worth your time. The signals are stars as a baseline popularity measure; recency of activity, so a project that has not been committed to in years drops down the list; contributor count as a rough bus-factor signal; fork ratio as context for whether a repo is being used as a starting template; README quality, checking for a real description, install steps and a license file; and license clarity, because for a commercial developer an unparseable license is functionally the same as a restrictive one. There is no paid placement and no way to pay to rank higher or be removed.
If you plan to ship a closed-source commercial game, the License filter is the most important control on the page. As rules of thumb: MIT and Apache 2.0 let you build a closed-source commercial product on top of the code with little more than an attribution requirement. LGPL is usually fine if you link to the library rather than copy its source into your own. GPL and AGPL are copyleft licenses: shipping a game built on that code can oblige you to release your own source under the same terms, which is why most commercial studios avoid them. Creative Commons licenses are written for art and assets rather than code, and the NonCommercial variants forbid paid use outright. When a license cannot be parsed the entry is marked Unknown, and you should read the actual license text before relying on it. None of this is legal advice — the linked repository on GitHub is always the real source of truth.
The catalog spans the engines and frameworks an indie developer is most likely to reach for: Godot (open-source, lightweight, strong in 2D), Unity (the largest asset and tooling ecosystem), Unreal (high-end 3D and visual scripting), Bevy (a modern, code-first Rust engine), and the smaller frameworks Phaser, LÖVE, Pygame, MonoGame and GameMaker. The Engine filter narrows the table to repositories tagged for the engine you are working in. A longer write-up comparing them lives in the game-engines guide, and the full reference on what each license means when you ship is in the open-source licenses guide.
Looking for game guides rather than code? The game guides section covers titles with little or no existing English documentation.