estella

Estella

A fast 2D and 3D game engine powered by WebAssembly and ECS

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Website • Getting Started • Documentation • Discord • QQ群: 481923584

What is Estella?

Estella is a 2D and 3D game engine — sprites, tilemaps and UI as much as lit, shadowed, physically simulated 3D worlds — with a TypeScript SDK driven by a high-performance C++ core — as WebAssembly on the web, and compiled ahead of time on native platforms. It outputs games that run in web browsers, on the desktop, in WeChat MiniGames, as single-file playable ads, and as native Android / iOS apps. A visual editor is available as a separate, free download.

Amazon Lumberyard Bistro, rendered in real time by Estella (a sun that follows the sky, baked bounce light and reflections, the Neutral output transform). Scene © Amazon Lumberyard, CC BY 4.0 , modified.

Why Estella?

2D and 3D, one engine — Sprites, tilemaps, UI and Spine alongside PBR-lit models, shadows, baked lighting and 3D physics, in the same scene, editor and export pipeline

Fast — C++ rendering pipeline compiled to WebAssembly, not interpreted JS

Type-safe — First-class TypeScript SDK with defineSystem, defineComponent, and Query

Data-oriented — Entity-Component-System architecture for scalable game logic

Visual editor — Scene hierarchy, inspector, asset browser — no JSON editing

Cross-platform — One codebase, deploy to web, desktop, WeChat MiniGames, playable ads, and native mobile

Animation & Physics — Built-in Spine animation, skeletal animation, and 2D and 3D physics

Agent-native — The editor is an MCP server and ships an agent of its own; both drive the same tools its UI does

Features

Install

Download the editor for Windows or macOS from estellaengine.com — served from the project's mirror, always the newest release. Every build is also on the releases page.

Create a Project

Open the editor and click New Project

Enter a project name, select a location, and click Create

The editor creates a project with a default scene containing a Camera entity.

Write Game Logic

Add entities and components in the scene editor, then write systems in TypeScript:

import {
    defineComponent, defineSystem, addSystem,
    Query, Mut, Res, Time, LocalTransform
} from 'esengine';

const Speed = defineComponent('Speed', { value: 200 });

addSystem(defineSystem(
    [Res(Time), Query(Mut(LocalTransform), Speed)],
    (time, query) => {
        for (const [entity, transform, speed] of query) {
            transform.position.x += speed.value * time.delta;
        }
    }
));

Press F5 in the editor to preview.

Let an agent build it

The editor speaks the Model Context Protocol. Point Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP-capable tool at it and the agent drives the real editor — opens projects, spawns entities from the same Create menu you use, edits component fields, enters play mode, takes a screenshot to see what it built, and exports the finished game. Sixty-five tools, all of them the pipelines the UI itself calls.

Every call goes through the editor's command surface, so creates are undoable and you can take the mouse back at any time. Tools a plugin adds are listed beside the editor's own.

Connecting an Agent (MCP) — connect Claude Code, Cursor, or your own

Documentation

Full documentation: estellaengine.com/docs

Introduction

Installation

Quick Start

ECS Architecture

Components

Systems

Building & Exporting

Android & iOS

AI Agents

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please read the Contributing Guide before submitting a Pull Request.

Maintainers: see the release procedure for candidate builds, acceptance evidence and publishing.

License

This repository — the engine runtime, the SDK, the asset pipeline, the CLI, the project templates and the editor plugin API — is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

You may use, modify, and distribute it for any purpose, including commercial use, free of charge. There is no separate commercial license and no noncommercial restriction. We follow Semantic Versioning and keep a CHANGELOG.

Three things to keep in mind:

The visual editor is a separate product and is not open source. It is free to

download and use, and it is built on this engine — but its source lives in a private repository rather than here. Everything needed to build, run and ship a game is in this repository: see BUSINESS_MODEL.md for what that boundary is and what changed.

Trademarks. Apache-2.0 grants rights to the code, not to the "Estella" /

"ESEngine" names or logos. You may state that your project uses Estella, but please don't imply endorsement or ship a fork under the Estella name.

Spine is separate. The bundled Spine Runtimes are not open

source. If you ship a game that uses Estella's Spine integration, you need a valid Spine license from Esoteric Software — independent of Estella's Apache-2.0 license. See NOTICE.

How the project sustains itself (sponsorship, optional hosted/pro add-ons, marketplace, and support) is described openly in BUSINESS_MODEL.md.