Tristeon is my 2D tile-based game engine. It is open-source and free, available under the MIT license on GitHub. The engine is designed for 2D tile-based platformers and thanks to its specialized genre, its editor workflow and programming API is well defined and optimized for 2D game development.
Tristeon is still under active development and has yet to be released, but in its current state it features a variety of exciting features such as hardware accelerated tile rendering, Box2D physics integration and a functioning editor allowing developers to design levels efficiently.
The engine can be found here: https://github.com/tristeon/tristeon
Hardware accelerated tile rendering
For Tristeon’s tile-map rendering, I made clever use of a full-screen shader. The entire level is uploaded to the VRAM in a buffer texture and tiles are then sampled on a per-pixel basis.
I describe this technique in more depth in my blog-post Tile-map rendering in Tristeon, its results enabled a significant performance improvement, massively improving scalability. The tile renderer finishes its render function at O(1) speed, as opposed to the O(n) speed of traditional sprite/tile renderers.
Qt editor
The engine features a 2D editor which can be used to create layers, draw tile-maps, and place/modify actors. The editor is built using Qt’s widgets library.
Leon Brands 