LunarBasic 0.8.0

LunarBasic 0.8.0 is out today! Windows and macOS builds now share the same rendering, audio, and input engine under the hood.

About this release

Up to now, the Windows and macOS runtimes were two separate implementations of the same ideas — Windows leaned on its own rendering and audio stack, macOS leaned on Apple’s. Two implementations means two places for the same bug to hide in slightly different forms, and two places to fix it. This cycle was spent collapsing that down to one shared engine that both platforms build on, so a fix or an improvement made once now benefits every player, on every platform, automatically.

For anyone just finding LunarBasic

LunarBasic is a simple, readable, BASIC-style language and IDE built specifically for making 2D games. You write your game, hit Run, and LunarBasic compiles it straight to a native executable — not an interpreter, not a VM, nothing your players need to install first. Just a standalone app that works.

That’s paired with a fully featured IDE: an editor with multi-file projects and symbol navigation, a messages window for build and runtime diagnostics, and a full step debugger with breakpoints and step into/over/out. Built-in docs, getting-started guides, a language reference, a system-function reference, and tutorials — are searchable right there in the help viewer, and an integrated Copilot-powered assistant can read your project, propose edits inline, and stream its work while you stay in control of what gets accepted.

The language itself is designed with game development as a first class citizen: sprites, images, and off-screen buffers with blend modes and a draw-offset/rotation stack for cameras; background music and sound effects with volume, pan, speed, and looping; keyboard, mouse, text input, and full gamepad support through one consistent API; a native 2D physics engine with dynamic and static bodies, collision filtering, and rotation locking; a particle simulator that handles tens of thousands of particles for sparks, smoke, and explosions; and direct support for loading Tiled maps, tilesets, and objects so level design doesn’t have to happen in code.

Come say hi

LunarBasic is still evolving, and we’d like to grow the community around this tool.

• Discord: https://discord.gg/3qZ56GTwam
• Community forum: available from the LunarBasic website