raylib founder Ramon Santamaria - #2 most popular open-source game-engine in the world

Ramon, creator of Raylib, joins us to discuss his journey from building an educational tool to establishing one of the most popular open-source game engines. As of February 2025, Raylib is the second most popular open-source game engine behind Godot, boasting 25,000 GitHub stars, 13,000 Discord community members, and over 8,000 subreddit members. Ramon has transitioned from lecturing and consulting to focusing on his paid tools built around Raylib.

We discuss:

• How Raylib started as a teaching project to help art students learn programming through simple and intuitive function naming.
• The active community behind Raylib and how Ramon personally engages with new members, contributing to the project's growth.
• Why simplicity and not making assumptions about prior knowledge can create a strong foundation for both beginners and experienced developers.
• The benefits of using a low-level library like Raylib versus higher-level game engines like Unity, particularly for small indie games.
• Ramon's approach to managing his workload as a solo developer, emphasizing organization, automation, and using his own tools to build tools.
• His method of testing new tools by quickly launching them, observing market response, and iterating on the most successful ones.
• The importance of enjoying the process of building an open-source project rather than focusing solely on commercial success.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. https://workos.com/

Links:

• Raylib (https://www.raylib.com/)
• Cat and Onion game (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2781210/CAT__ONION/)
• Raylib GitHub (https://github.com/raysan5/raylib)
• Raylib Discord (https://discord.gg/raylib)
• Raylib Subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/raylib/)
• Ramon's Tools (https://raylibtech.com/tools/)