Introducing Static Rectangle Engine

I started this project a few weeks ago, the goal? make my own game engine, why? purely educational reasons honestly. In my humble (and uneducated) opinion, there are a number of reasons someone may want to build their own game engine today, even in the land of Unity / Unreal and Godot etc. Full unbridled control and comprehension would be first and foremost. For me this is rather important, over my many years I have seen projects of great potential buckle and fold when those appointed to maintain them weren’t given the time to fully grasp them.

Realistically, if I were to take a game to market I think I would utilise Unity, Unreal or Godot. I am in no position to write my own commercial game engine from the ground up, certainly not one that can ship across multiple platforms. I do not, or could not presume to know better than the thousands of insanely talented developers behind those offerings.

All this said, for this project I really have one important goal in mind, education. There are many aspects of game development that I find really inspiring and given the world today, immersing yourself in what inspires you can only be a good thing.

So here we are, I have embarked on a new project… I introduce to you, Static Rectangle Engine. This is a tongue-in-cheek working title, and was given this name because after a week of work learning the Vulkan API all I had to show for it was a “static rectangle”.

This project is written in C++ and will be utilising the Vulkan Graphics API. As you may be able to tell from the screenshots / recording I am currently developing on a MacBook but will be setting this up to cross compile on my Windows workstation (something I haven’t attempted before). My current plans are to implement a deferred renderer (maybe.. as research suggests forward renderers are coming back in favour) and Physically Based Rendering. I’d love to investigate my own physics engine even knowing I am not even remotely qualified, I’m sure that’d yield hilarious results which I think is still meaningful.

As you can see from this, I have quite some way to go.