Ursina is a new open source game engine in which you can code any type of game in Python, be it 2-D, 3-D, an application, a visualization, you name it.

Ursina is the latest engine in our series of gamedev engine reviews which have included Stride, O3DE, LWJGL and Cave.

From those, the one that comes closest to Ursina is Cave, which is also powered by Python, but in comparison Cave looks more obscure and blunt while Ursina is more polished and easier to use.

Also, Cave while free to use even for commercial applications, is not open source but is proprietary to Uniday Studio who require attribution - you must give appropriate credit to Uniday Studio and Cave Engine in your game and the exported game cannot include a copy of the Cave Engine Editor itself. Ursina on the contrary is fully permissive and open, licensed under a MIT license with no revenue cut or subscription fees.

At this point you might be wondering if Python is fast enough for game development in comparison to C++. The answer is that Ursina's most critical parts are written in C++ or shader code,
something that allows you to use Python on top of it without incurring any penalties in performance, hence letting
you free to enjoy the productivity advantages of writing code in Python.

Framework wise, in Ursina everything starts with the Entity, aka "God" object, which has, as expected, properties
like model, texture, and color and functionality like positioning, rotating while taking inputs and responding to events.
The easiest example on how to create and use an Entity, a Cube in this case looks like:

You see that the code is clean and self-explanatory.

To get into it in more depth, by browsing through the documentation you get a sense of the engine's capabilities:

• Coordination System
• Collision detection
• Animation
• Networking

A quick way to build your very first game is by going through the Introductory Tutorial.

Ursina is available for all popular platforms, MacOS, Windows and Linux. To install it just use pip :

pip install ursina

Also install the optional dependencies with:

pip install ursina[extras]

Now you're set to go writing your very first game with Ursina!

To conclude, Ursina with its clean cut interface offers a first class opportunity for those already familiar with Python to add game development into their skills arsenal as well. Why not?

More Information

Ursina

Ursina on Github

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