Murder Engine – C# ECS 2D Game Engine / News / May 27, 2025 / C#, Engine The Murder Engine is a C# powered, open-source, 2D game engine built on top of FNA (and thus XNA) built around ECS or the Entity Component System. The Murder engine is described succinctly as: This is the source for Murder Engine, a pixel art ECS game engine built on top of FNA. 🚧👷 Warning Proceed at your own risk. This is an in-development engine, which is another way of saying that it will change quite a lot. We do our best to keep release branches stable, but expect a lot of breaking changes and things that are not perfect (yet!). It cleanly separates your game logic from the level editor (which is part of the game project) and the level editor has a surprisingly robust number of tools. This includes a full map editor, via conversation system, ways to define entity composition and manage game data and much more. Projects are ultimately created using the C# programming language and Microsoft Visual Studio 2022, so obviously Windows is required. The engine is open-source under the MIT license. It is also home to several sub projects such as bang – the C# entity component system framework as well as gum – the language for creating branching dialogs that is embedded in the editor. One thing this engine certainly lacks however is documentation. There is a minimal amount of reference materials available but for the most part you will have to puzzle things out on your own. Thankfully there are two projects to get you started, the former Ludum Dare winner Neo City Express as well as the Hello Murder starter project. When starting out with either project make sure you clone the repository recursively. Key Links Murder Engine GitHub Repository Neo City Express Repository Hello Murder Repository Project Documentation Discord Server You can learn more about the awesome but poorly named Murder engine in the video below.