Hello,

I own a PC from 2010, with 3GB of RAM only and no graphic card (just a chipset on the motherboard). Unreal and Godot doesn't work on it. This PC can run Unity but it's slow as hell.

What game engine should you recommend to make a 2D game, running on this low-end PC?

Thank you for your help!

Go here and see if it works for you

https://www.otakhi.com/petridish​

Engine developed on a 9 year old pc and everything works fine.

Without a graphic card, it could be a problem.

You definetely need a dedicated graphics card or at least a very good high-end chip (Intel HD Graphics/AMD Vega), this is the main reason why none of what you mentioned will work. Those software requires hardware rendering, you won't find any (modern) game engine without it, because it simply is state of the art.

Btw. I ran Unity as a professional on a 2007 PC with AMD Chip, AMD Radeon 2600 GPU and 2GB RAM (Windows XP) some time ago, so it works somehow and it is fast enougth to work with it (except build times are incredible slow anyways)

Thank you for your answers. It seems that I must upgrade my PC…

You might have luck with Love2D. It uses Lua, a very good scripting language, well worth learning.

I heard about Love2D. Do you think that this engine is powerful enough achieve games like “Ori and the blind forest” ?

Love2D is good. I think it's more like a framework than an engine, meaning it doesn't have tools like an IDE and a WYSIWYG editor, embedded UI controls (buttons), so you have to use third party tools or build these things yourself. I recommend to anyone as a starting point, if they want to make games without more complex engines.

A game like Ori would require a ton of work, especially shaders, so the game will be a bit heavy on the GPU. It's a very complex game, made by a very talented and experienced team (see the GDC talk). I don't mean it's not possible, just not as easy as it might look from the 2D platform gameplay. But you can certainly make very beautiful and complex game with Love2D, with enough effort (but this is true for any engine).

My game engine http://maker4d.uw.hu/index.html​ works with software rendering (requires no 3d acceleration), but its suitable only for creating 2D and 3D RPG games and visual novels (similar to final fantasy 7/8, alone in the dark).

I would write something simple with SDL or PyGame.

Or maybe a visual novel engine – those don't need much graphics :-)

ItsOff said:
just a chipset on the motherboard

What chipset? 2010 is the year Intel moved the iGPU from the motherboard to the CPU itself (although it's entirely possible machines purchased in 2010 use older chips).

Those aren't exactly speedy, but they'll handle basic graphics just fine. I used integrated-GPU MacBooks of that era, and used various open-source graphics libraries with some success (Ogre3D and Horde3D, IIRC).