Deki Engine: A Unity-Style Game Editor for ESP32 Explained

Building a polished 2D game for a microcontroller usually means hand-writing display drivers, sprite blitters and input code before you place a single character. Deki Engine wants to change that. It is a free, open-source modular C++ engine with a Unity-style visual editor that targets ESP32 boards first, and its version 0.20 release on October 24, 2026 is all about making those tiny games run faster and smoother.

• What it is: a modular C++ engine plus a visual editor for Windows and Linux, with the compiler bundled, all released under Apache 2.0 on GitHub
• Performance: CNX Software reports 60 FPS on an ESP32-S3, demonstrated on a LilyGO T-Display S3 Touch
• Boards: packages for the LilyGO T-Deck Plus and T-Display S3 AMOLED, with Elecrow CrowPanel Advanced 7-inch ESP32-P4 support coming
• Timeline: open-sourced October 12, Japanese, Chinese and Korean localization in 0.19 on October 17, and the performance-focused 0.20 on October 24

What Is Deki Engine?

Deki Engine is the side project of Jairo Baldán, a game programmer from Spain, who builds it after work. The idea is familiar to anyone who has used a desktop game engine: you build scenes visually from sprites, text, particles, tilemaps, state machines and tweens, choose a target board in the editor's Build panel, then flash it. The same project can also run on a Windows or Linux desktop through SDL3, which makes iteration much quicker, or run headless with the renderer removed entirely.

Everything is a package, so you only pull in what your project needs. Beyond the board packages, the catalog includes a software 3D render pass, IMU and real-time clock support, audio over I2S, Wi-Fi, BLE and an importer for Tiled maps. Finished games can also run on Tactility OS for the ESP32.

Which ESP32 Boards Does Deki Engine Support?

Hardware support is delivered as board packages. The current list, per CNX Software:

• LilyGO T-Deck Plus: display, touch, keyboard, trackball, SD card, GPS and an SX1262 LoRa radio all supported
• LilyGO T-Display S3 AMOLED: supported, and the 60 FPS demo appears to run on the T-Display S3 Touch
• Elecrow CrowPanel Advanced 7-inch (ESP32-P4): support announced as upcoming

The ESP32-S3 remains one of the most capable mainstream microcontrollers for this kind of work, with enough PSRAM and SPI bandwidth to push full-screen sprites. If you are deciding which chip to build around, our earlier look at ESP32 JavaScript touchscreen apps with Kryonos shows another approach to making touchscreen projects easier on the same family of boards.

What's New in Deki 0.20?

The project's own news page describes 0.20 as a release about performance: games draw faster, frames no longer tear, the engine drives many more screens, scrolling feels right, and settings now pick sensible defaults automatically. Those are exactly the problems that make small-screen games feel janky, so it is a welcome focus for an engine that only went public two weeks ago.

One engineering detail stands out. Editor fields tagged with DEKI_EXPORT are discovered at build time using C++26 static reflection, which generates sliders, ranges, undo support and serialization from that single tag. CNX also notes that most commits in the repositories are co-authored with Claude, making Deki a neat example of a solo developer using AI coding assistance to ship an ambitious toolchain.

Who Should Try Deki Engine?

If you own a T-Deck Plus or a T-Display S3 and have wanted to make a handheld game, a kiosk UI or an animated dashboard without writing a renderer, Deki is worth a download. It is early-stage hobby software, so expect rough edges in the documentation, but the core workflow — design visually, test on desktop, flash to hardware — is the right one. Being Apache 2.0, it is also free to build commercial projects on.

Find more ESP32 and microcontroller projects in our mini computer coverage.

Sources: Deki Engine — official site and release notes — October 24, 2026; CNX Software — October 25, 2026.