Modularity

Mach aims to be opinionated enough to provide a cohesive high-level experience, but modular enough to let you use only a subset of it.

‘standard library’ of Zig gamedev modules

Mach is a ‘standard library’ of Zig gamedev modules. For example, you can import and use just specific parts of Mach like the mach.math library and use these to build your own engine.

Alternative to GLFW/SDL + OpenGL/Vulkan, Raylib, etc

Many folks join the Mach and Zig communities looking to ‘make games mostly from scratch’ using something minimal like GLFW+OpenGL, SDL+Vulkan, Raylib, etc. but find working with those libraries can be a bit tedious as they are C libraries.

Mach offers a pure Zig alternative to those libraries. Since it is experimental, it’s definitely not as polished yet - but you can use just the part of Mach that opens a window, uses a low-level graphics API, and use Zig as your shading language. This is higher-level than GLFW/SDL/OpenGL/Vulkan, but lower-level than libraries like Raylib.

Then, if you like, you can optionally use some higher-level Mach modules for text rendering and other things to move a little-bit closer to something like Raylib.

Alternative to Unity/Unreal/Godot

This is our ultimate goal, and we’re certainly not there yet - but the aim is for Mach’s individual modules to ultimately build up to an experience competitive with the big engines of today - but in a much more modular, still cohesive, way.

What about the full engine, GUI editor, etc.?

The engine is the overall composition of two things:

The Mach standard library - the engine APIs and ‘blessed’ paths for doing things, as a bunch of modules.
The Mach editor and CLI tooling - coming soon - which will provide standard tools and high-level experiences you’d expect from a game engine - designed to integrate nicely with our module system.

Whether you use both, or how much of either you decide to use, is up to you!

Can I make my own game engine using Mach?

Yes! For example instead of using SDL+OpenGL, you might choose to rely on just mach.core - and if you need a math library you might use mach.math - both of which are modules in the Mach standard library.