The official blog of Stride, an open-source C# game engine formerly called Xenko, covering releases and engine internals.
Commenters suggest Stride as a pure C# alternative to Unity and Godot, citing good C# tooling, Bepu physics, and Linux support.
Suggestion: try doing it as a hobby before doing any major career changes.
> I love games
Many do, but game development can be tedious sometimes, or you might just discover that you like something else more.
# Game engines: Godot
For an easy start at putting something together, consider downloading Godot: https://godotengine.org/
It's a free game engine that's relatively simple, is open source, and supports both 2D and 3D, as well as has their own scripting language called GDScript (that should be easy to learn if you know Python), whilst also supporting C# (which is used more commonly in the industry). The documentation is pretty good, though you can also watch videos, like this channel for example: https://www.youtube.com/@Gdquest/videos
Follow the tutorials and try to put your own game together, see what working with maths/physics/things like raycasts is like, what it's like to deal with a game loop and scene trees, how logic that's attached to various nodes/objects interacts. Don't make the game anything complicated, start out with something like pong, breakout or snake.
# Game engines: Unity
If you want to focus more on what's used in the industry, rather than something that's just approachable, download Unity: https://unity.com/
You can do this as the first step as well, though you will have to use C# for the most part (though you can get Lua plugins, IIRC). This engine also has a rich ecosystem around it, as well as lots of different assets/plugins in the…
This may be your personal experience but it is used successfully and happily by many in a variety of domains way different to "boring OOP back-ends". No popular general purpose language is confined to a single scenario the way you describe (even Swift and Kotlin are expanding). C# lets you do things like writing a competitive Redis implementation[0], advanced physics engine that beats Jolt[1] or a game engine that does not rely on C++ or C[2], cross-platform applications[3] and so on and so forth. It is possible to successfully do both high level FP style approach for business domain modeling and very low-level data crunching that is competitive with systems programming languages.
[0]: https://microsoft.github.io/garnet/docs/benchmarking/results-resp-bench
[1]: https://github.com/bepu/bepuphysics2
[2]: https://www.stride3d.net
[3]: https://avaloniaui.net
I picked up Godot years ago, and played with it on and off, because I am only a hobbyist. I have been spending time in Godot and in Stride[0], an opensource Unity-like 3D GE, but with a lot less clutter and fantastic C# and VS/VS Code support. Stride also has a lot of great documentation and examples, and you can utilize C# scripts from Unity with some tweaking. The visual effects program vvvv, has a new product gamma based on Stride[1]. When and if Godot gets stronger on 3D, I may switch completely to it, although I wish it had a Lisp/Scheme for the scripting language...maybe Janet[2] could be used! Like I said my wish list. I am so happy there are so many choices available. I started programming in 1978, so things have come a long way for sure!
[0] https://stride3d.net/
[1] https://vvvv.org/
[2] https://janet-lang.org/
I've been looking into Stride[0] for a bit and it seems to meet most of your requirements. I'm not sure at all about embedded support but it does seem to treat Linux as a first class citizen for once.
the main up/downside is that it's a C# engine. So it won't necessarily be as hyper-optimal as c++ without some discipline on what parts of the language you use (hint: avoid LINQ at all costs in the hot loop, and look at the newer ways in C# on how to utilize unmanaged collections).
0: https://www.stride3d.net/
Helo HN, joreg here, one of the devvvvs team of 5. We've just released a preview of the new 3d engine VL.Stride for vvvv. It is based on the open-source .NET engine http://stride3d.net
It is free for non-commercial use without any restrictions, no registration required. Windows only for now.
Looking forward to your feedback and please let us know if this is something that could be useful for you!
Here's a bunch, in no particular order:
https://godotengine.org/
https://o3de.org/
https://defold.com/
https://www.stride3d.net/
https://gdevelop.io/
https://armory3d.org/
https://torque3d.org/engine/
https://flaxengine.com/
https://pragma-engine.com/
https://wickedengine.net/
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
https://castle-engine.io/
https://solarus-games.org/