A 2D game engine with a Vulkan renderer and an ImGui-based editor, written in C++ to learn graphics programming and engine architecture from the ground up.
Every line written by hand. No AI-generated code. The goal was to learn, not to ship it.
Developed November 2023 – November 2024. Currently paused — see Status.
The engine renders batched, colored 2D quads through Vulkan and hosts them in an editor where entities can be selected and inspected at runtime.
Rendering
- Vulkan backend: instance/device setup, swapchain, render passes, graphics pipeline, descriptor sets, command buffer recording
- Quad batch renderer with per-frame-in-flight vertex buffers
- Render command queue between the application and the backend
- Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) for buffer and image allocation
- Orthographic camera
Editor
- ImGui docking layout with the scene rendered to a viewport texture
- Entity hierarchy panel
- Mouse picking via a dedicated object-ID color attachment
- Runtime stats: frame time, draw calls, vertex buffer count
Core
- Entity Component System built on entt (Transform, Render, Layer, Tag components)
- Event and input system
- Frame profiler (Optick) with scoped instrumentation
- Allocation tracker for leak detection
- Logging via spdlog, assertion macros that compile out in release builds
- Windowing and platform layer over GLFW, with an abstract entry point so a runtime or editor target can share the same engine
Listed so the scope is clear. None of these exist in the codebase:
- Textures and materials — geometry is vertex-colored only
- 3D rendering
- Scene serialization and asset management
- Physics
- Scripting
- Audio
- Linux/macOS support — Windows only
- Automated tests
Requires Windows, Visual Studio 2022 or newer, and Vulkan SDK 1.3.204.1.
git clone https://github.com/baselsaad/PL-Engine.git
cd PL-Engine/script
Build.bat
This generates PL-Engine.sln via premake. Open it and build the Editor target.
Shaders in Source/Engine/res/shaders are GLSL and must be compiled to SPIR-V with glslc
before running — the engine loads .spv files directly and does not compile at runtime.
The engine follows Hazel by The Cherno, whose Game Engine series I worked through while building this.
Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory shaped the higher-level design decisions, the subsystem layering, the engine/editor/runtime split, and the resource and memory management model.
Third-party libraries: Vulkan, GLFW, ImGui, entt, glm, spdlog, VulkanMemoryAllocator, Optick, stb_image.
Paused since November 2024, for time rather than technical reasons — other projects and my day job took priority.
Things I would do differently:
- Sub-allocate batches from one large per-frame buffer rather than allocating a separate
VkBufferper batch. The current approach churns allocations when the batch count fluctuates between frames.
See LICENSE.