Building a Custom Game Engine in C++

There’s something deeply satisfying about building a game engine from scratch. No frameworks, no training wheels — just you, a compiler, and a blank screen waiting to be filled with pixels.

Why Build Your Own?

The obvious answer is learning. But beyond that, there’s an unmatched level of control you get when every line of code is yours. You understand every allocation, every system interaction, every frame’s worth of work.

Entity Component System (ECS)

The heart of our engine’s architecture is an ECS. Instead of deep inheritance hierarchies, entities are just IDs, and components are plain data stored in contiguous arrays. Systems iterate over components to apply behavior.

// A simple transform component
struct Transform {
    glm::vec3 position;
    glm::quat rotation;
    glm::vec3 scale;
};

// The render system processes all entities with Transform + Mesh
void RenderSystem::update(World& world) {
    for (auto [entity, transform, mesh] : world.view<Transform, Mesh>()) {
        drawMesh(mesh, transform.toMatrix());
    }
}

Memory Management

Custom allocators are crucial for performance. We use a stack allocator for per-frame temporary data and a pool allocator for fixed-size game objects. This gives us predictable performance and zero fragmentation.

More posts coming soon as the engine evolves!