Lenga 0.9.0 Is Here: Build Games with PHP

After months of building, testing, breaking, rebuilding, polishing, and pushing the engine further than it had ever gone before, Lenga now has a complete desktop game-making loop. You can start with an idea, create a project, build a scene, write gameplay in PHP, press Play, and turn that project into a Windows or macOS build.

That is the promise we have been working toward from the beginning. With 0.9.0, it is no longer just a promise.

Download Lenga 0.9.0 and start building today.

A Real Game-Making Workflow

Lenga is built around a simple question: what if making a game with PHP felt as natural as working in a modern game editor?

Version 0.9.0 is our strongest answer yet. Projects, scenes, GameObjects, components, assets, scripts, cameras, physics, animation, audio, UI, particles, and build settings now work as parts of one connected workflow. You can compose a level visually, expose gameplay values in the Inspector, reference objects without hardcoding paths, preview changes quickly, and package the result for another machine.

We spent a lot of time on the details that make an editor feel trustworthy. Scene placement should match the running game. Cameras should show what players will actually see. Assets should move, import, preview, and connect without ceremony. Undo, focus controls, drag and drop, project creation, component authoring, and build output should all help you keep momentum.

There is still plenty to improve before 1.0, but 0.9.0 feels like an engine you can sit down with and make something.

2D Is Ready to Play

The most complete way to build with Lenga today is 2D, and there is a lot to play with.

You can create worlds with sprites, drawing primitives, and tilemaps; bring them to life with animation and particle effects; add collision and movement with 2D physics; build menus and HUDs with the UI system; and layer in music and sound through the audio workflow.

GameObjects and components keep projects modular. Renderers own presentation. Rigidbodies and colliders own physical behavior. Animation controllers organize motion and state. Cameras frame the action. PHP behaviours connect those pieces into the rules that make your game yours.

Whether your idea is a platformer, puzzle game, arcade challenge, top-down adventure, or something we have not imagined yet, Lenga 0.9.0 gives you a practical place to begin.

Yes, the Gameplay Is PHP

PHP is not sitting off to the side as a build tool. It is the gameplay language.

Scripts extend Lenga's Behaviour class and attach directly to GameObjects. Public properties appear in the Inspector, including references to other GameObjects and components. That means designers can tune speed, health, effects, targets, and other gameplay values without digging through source code every time.

The scripting API covers the engine systems you expect: transforms, input, physics, animation, audio, particles, scenes, debug logging, signals, coroutines, and more. The native engine handles performance-sensitive work while PHP stays focused on the decisions, interactions, and rules you want to iterate on quickly.

If you already know PHP, you can bring years of language and tooling experience into game development. If you do not, Lenga's component-oriented workflow gives you a clear reason to discover how expressive modern PHP has become.

Particles Got Seriously Powerful

This release takes particle effects far beyond a simple emitter.

The editor now exposes a broad set of modules for emission, shape, motion, forces, color, size, rotation, collision, trails, rendering, and other lifetime behavior. You can build sparks, smoke, impacts, weather, glowing pickups, ambient motion, stylized trails, and effects that are much stranger than anything we can fit into a feature list.

Reusable particle profiles make it easier to carry a visual style across a whole project. More importantly, the effect stays visible while you author it, so experimentation feels immediate. Change a value, see the result, and keep shaping the moment until it feels right.

3D Has Entered the Scene

The 3D path is younger than 2D, but it is no longer just a placeholder.

Lenga 0.9.0 can create and author 3D scenes with cameras, models, meshes, materials, lights, skyboxes, rigidbodies, colliders, and physics queries. Scene navigation and orientation tools make it possible to compose a level visually, while the same GameObject and PHP scripting patterns carry across both 2D and 3D projects.

We are being honest about where this stands: 3D still needs more depth, performance work, and production hardening on the road to 1.0. Even so, the foundation is real, it is growing quickly, and we are excited to see what developers try with it.

A First Glimpse of the Web

Lenga 0.9.0 includes an experimental command-line Web export path for early testing. It can package compatible projects for the browser and gives us a working foundation for runtime and scripting parity on the Web.

This is a preview, not the finished Web workflow. Version 0.9.1 will bring that work into the editor with project preflight, clearer dependency handling, managed build tooling, and deployment-ready output. For 0.9.0, Windows and macOS remain the actively validated desktop targets.

This Is Only 0.9

Reaching 0.9.0 took an enormous amount of work. Every smoother interaction in the editor sits on top of dozens of decisions about serialization, runtime parity, scripting, rendering, physics, packaging, and how all of those systems should meet without making developers carry the complexity.

We worked hard for this release, and it shows. We are also nowhere near finished.

You can download Lenga 0.9.0, explore the Lenga documentation, and find the SDK artifacts and full technical notes in the 0.9.0 release on GitHub.

Bring the game idea you have been carrying around. Open a scene. Write some PHP. Press Play. Let us see what you build.