A modern & lightweight HTML5 game engine

melonJS is an open-source 2.5D game engine for indie developers — perspective and orthogonal cameras, GPU-accelerated tilemap rendering, 3D mesh support, Light2d, and polygon-accurate physics. Runs on WebGL or Canvas2D, tree-shakeable, and ~150 KB minzipped of vanilla JS/TS.

Fast

Modern ES6 architecture. WebGL renderer with Canvas fallback. Web Audio with 3D spatial sound.

Free

Released under the permissive MIT License. No cost. Forever.

Standalone

Zero dependencies. Compatible with all major browsers and mobile devices. ~150 KB minzipped — tree-shakeable, so you only pay for what you use.

Why melonJS?

melonJS is designed so you can focus on making games, not on graphics plumbing.

Canvas2D-Inspired API

If you've used the HTML5 Canvas, you already know melonJS. The rendering API (save, restore, translate, rotate, setColor, fillRect, ...) follows the same familiar patterns — no render graphs, no shader pipelines, no instruction sets to learn.

True Renderer Abstraction

Write your game once, run it on WebGL or Canvas2D with zero code changes. The engine handles all GPU complexity behind a unified API, with automatic fallback when WebGL is not available. Designed to support future backends (WebGPU) without touching game code.

Complete Engine, Minimal Footprint

Physics, tilemaps, audio, input, cameras, tweens, particles, UI — a full game stack in a single tree-shakeable ES module. No dependency sprawl, no library stitching.

Tiled as a First-Class Citizen

Deep Tiled integration built into the core: orthogonal, isometric, hexagonal and staggered maps, animated tilesets, collision shapes, object properties, compressed formats — all parsed and rendered natively.

Batteries Included

Get started in minutes with minimal setup. Sprites, animations, 3D mesh rendering, built-in & custom shaders, spatial audio and particle effects — ready to use out of the box.

Hackable by Design

ES6 classes throughout, a plugin system for engine extensions, and a clean architecture that's easy to extend without fighting the framework. Go as deep as you need.

Powerful Level Design

Design your levels visually with the Tiled map editor. melonJS natively supports orthogonal, isometric, and hexagonal maps with multiple layers, parallax scrolling, and more.

melonJS level design with Tiled map editor showing platformer game

Try it Live

Jump right into a melonJS game — playable in your browser.

Get Started in Seconds

Scaffold a new project with a single command:

npm create melonjs@latest my-game
cd my-game
npm install
npm run dev

Or use the API directly for a quick Hello World:

import { Application, Text } from "melonjs";

// create a new melonJS application
const app = new Application(1218, 562, {
    parent: "screen",
    scale: "auto",
});

// add a text display object
app.world.addChild(new Text(609, 281, {
    font: "Arial",
    size: 160,
    fillStyle: "#FFFFFF",
    textBaseline: "middle",
    textAlign: "center",
    text: "Hello World !",
}));

Features

Fast WebGL & Canvas rendering across desktop and mobile, with automatic fallback
GPU-accelerated tile rendering for orthogonal Tiled maps under WebGL 2 — one quad per layer, no per-tile loop
Optional perspective camera (Camera3d) with frustum culling for 2.5D / projected scenes
3D mesh rendering with OBJ/MTL loading, multi-material support, and hardware depth testing
Light2d as a first-class renderable — multi-light, radial-gradient falloff, illumination-only mode, normal-map sprite shading
Per-camera post-processing with stackable shader effects (Flash, Outline, Glow, CRT, Hologram, ColorMatrix) and custom ShaderEffect per-sprite fragment effects
Physics: polygon SAT collision, QuadTree/Octree broad-phase (auto-swapped 2D↔3D), 2D & 3D raycasts, plus pluggable adapters (Matter / Planck)
Full Tiled map editor integration — every feature supported (any map format, animated tilesets, custom properties, parallax layers, native .aseprite tilesets)
Web Audio with 3D spatial sound, stereo panning, and procedural audio primitives (oscillators, noise) for SFX without sample assets
Multi-input: mouse, touch, keyboard, gamepad & accelerometer
UI toolkit with drag-and-drop, hover/press buttons, and bitmap-font text
Tweens, transitions & particle effects
Spine 4.3 runtime integration via the official plugin
State manager, asset loader & plugin system
~150 KB minzipped — tree-shakeable, zero dependencies