Have you tried Luanti yet? It originally was called Minetest: https://www.luanti.org/
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Roblox has always struck me as being like Unity (and i suppose Godot too but i haven't touched that for game development). Similar environments and tools. Roblox only really handles distribution, but you can easily handle that yourself with itch or gamejolt (or if you have the cash i believe steam is 100$ for a developer account). This is only really for single player experiences though
Godot is really good, but it doesn't distribute your games, right?
No. Distribution is left to the developer.
But the silver lining is that you’re outside of a walled garden and outside of a company’s control.
Yeah but I don't think anyone of us are going so big that'd be a hassle :-) and it could just be opt in too...
Gmod is essentially Roblox's father. It's limited in what you can do but is still really good and has a shockingly active community.
The best Roblox alternative is S&box, but it's not out yet. It's a spiritual successor to Gmod that aims to be a gaming platform that's developer friendly and good to consumers. There's a developer alpha you can join to start making games in it, but the community is not there yet and it's likely a few years away.
Also worth mentioning that S&box is developed by the same guy as GMod
If you tie yourself to a commercial platform, it's gonna take advantage of you. That's how they make money. So, I would also recommend using an open-source game engine like Godot and then distributing on multiple platforms.
The closest open-source thing to the Roblox model, that I can think of, is Luanti, which is basically a game engine and distribution platform for Minecraft-like games. Don't expect to make money off of it, though.
Fortnite. Yes, Fortnite. They've added a bunch of crazy stuff similar to Roblox where you can be paid for your content. Hell, Gaijin just bought the rights to a stupid custom map in the game for this very reason.
It's free, and so are the tools. But the tools are also just... UE5. Which is also free and literally made to develop games.
It's called UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite), not Fortnite the game specifically. From what I understand it's a watered down version of Unreal Engine and is really good to use, lets you publish your games straight to the platform.
Minecraft (Java edition)
Luanti (formerly Minetest) might be closer to what OP is looking for. Both because LUA and because it's platform-like.
EDIT: Also I didn't notice at first, but OP's previous post was asking about Minecraft vs. Luanti
In my opinion Luanti is a living proof that top-down extensibility aka "we make monolithic engine in C++ and then provide some APIs for scripting via bindings for some scripting language on the side" doesn't work well. You can't change main menu, you can't fix player controller (and the default one sucks), you can't write your own renderer, etc. Because developers didn't imagine someone would want that (actually they probably did, but they simply don't have capacity to provide this). Good extensibility/modability should be automatic, on binary level. Like what you get by developing in bytecode/JIT-compiled languages like Java/C# or in old Unreal Engines where everything was done in bytecode-(de)compilable special language called Unreal Script.
The problem for me is that it repeats many of the issues I had with Minecraft, so I don't really have a good base to start with. Not really interested in LUA either, so there is even less motivation for me to make something from the ground up (I should probably be doing something with Godot instead).
I imagine the benefit for Luanti would be if you want to make a simple grid-based game it should be easy to do so (similar-to-but-easier-than a MC mod for example). Trying different games though, it was hit-or-miss for me especially when it just spits you falling into an empty world (I assume that's a known config-error or incompatibility).
Seconded
You can do a lot in minecraft with mods and/or datapacks and plugins
Doom WADs for a huge back catalog, elder scrolls mods for Bethesda tools and a pretty big player base, Unity/UE for more professional game designer tools, mega man maker for something quick and simple and fun to jump into