Can recommend Odin[0] if you want to play with Raylib. Great for prototyping, although I'm not sure if it will last further on in development. Still have to figure that one out.
I like Odin because it values the low-friction of C, unlike just about every other "better C" I've tried. It adds friction where you're likely to cut yourself, and reduces friction where it matters; in places like:
- having semantic modules instead of textual inclusion
- having a nice build-system built in
- smart bounds-checking/integer-wrapping semantics (customizable, too!)
- predefined mathematical operators for things like vectors and matrices
- an actually useful core library
There's no particular feature of Odin that really stands out, but where Odin outclasses every language available is that every single feature has been very thoughtfully considered and designed to have the least amount of issues. Once you work with it for a few months, it becomes obvious very quickly its vision is remarkably consistent, leading to a smooth and outright delightful development experience.
I will caution, if you are the type of developer who likes to pull in lots of packages and dependencies to start a project, it's not for you. There's no package manager, and rightly so[1]. You'll have to build most high-level systems yourself. But when you realise that most frameworks and dependencies are trivial to implement by hand, this won't be a bother.
If you're the kind of developer who loves building systems and doing everything yourself, you'll feel right at home.
[1] https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2025/09/08/package-manage...
I am _not_ talking about ease of use or interface.
For a long time Godot has not been ready for medium-large 3D releases, that is changing, but for the most part both it and Raylib are very reliable and will be perfectly good to release a 2D game with.
I'm not actually sure whether a 3D game with skinned meshes will ever be in-scope for Raylib. Wouldn't seem like it.
I interpret this to mean something like “as my game gets more involved” which is not unrelated to a venture into 3D. Why are you policing my comment which is trying to be helpful?