Product page for lite-C, which the 3D Game Studio developed with Atari:
It’s free for non-commercial use but at first glance has many disadvantages against Unity, including there being no mention of cross-platform development and having its own language (come on, people!). Not going to try it myself, being quite content with Unity, but it’s good to see more tools emerging. It’s definitely along the lines of the democratization of development tools that Phil Harrison was talking about.
I took a look at lite-c about a year ago, but felt the whole thing needed to mature a bit (Lite-c, not the game engine itself) which I’m sure it has by now.
I also remember feeling, as I worked with it, that it felt like an game engine with its origins in the late DOS days (i.e. terminology used, methods of getting things into the game, input gathering, etc.) It seems like quite a stable and capable engine though …
While the lack of cross-platform is not a deal-killer, with Unity offering cross-platform and me having committed much time and money into getting, learning and using Unity, for me the lite-c boat has passed (to mangle an analogy) … 
lite-c basically is the lowest gamestudio edition without the level editor (and the really bad thing about gamestudio are the editors :)). the a7 engine itself and the lite-c language are quite nice in my opinion.
lite-c is closer to ansi-c than unity javascript is to javascript. it’s c with some additions like coroutines and automatic pointer detection (no need for → operator).
Unity’s main advantage for me, from the language point of view, comes from it not forcing you into any particular one. You can use their not-exactly-javascript, if you wish, but being based on .Net and able to use any of the CLI languages was an incredible plus. And that’s not even considering the chance that you may want to look at general libraries, say for file encoding or encryption, where having a well accepted platform is a huge win.
Whomever came up with using .net made the right call.
yes, .net for sure is nice. can you really use every .net language (like ironpython) with unity without much effort? or only the 3 supported ones?
with lite-c you can directly use every c-library. you will find almost everything you need as a c-library too. c still is a well accepted platform.
the lack of OO is a disadvantage though.
I see, not only being close to C but actually being able to use C libraries makes a lot of sense. I was wondering if they had done a “we’ve copied the syntax, but that’s it” sort of thing (Wikipedia was not helpful on the issue).