The Nio Engine

The Nio Engine is a game engine hobby project I’ve been making for a while. Built entirely in C++, my objective was to build an engine dedicated to pixel perfect rendering and physics, focusing on elements only possible within those limited options while making rendering, building, and making games faster and easier than it was for me using other mainstream engines. Nio Engine is first and foremost a 3D engine in it’s core, yet it beats in term of speed and performance any pixel focused renderer out there.

What can it do?

  • Pixel Perfect Shadows

    No limits to the scene size, the number of lights, and low performance impact at all time using a unique polar filter approach to 2D shadow creation.

  • Cellular Automata

    Everything is a particle, everything can move independently, down to each pixel making each and every sprite

  • Fully featured Editor

    The editor allows to make the game from the first to the last step, without ever touching the core code. Animation Systems, ECS scene graph, tilemap editor, ressource viewer & manager, and more!

  • C# Scripting

    ECS based C# scripting is supported throughout the entire engine using Mono. While the engine is entirely written in C / C++, being able to write games faster using C# scripting comes in extremely hand thanks to the fast iteration times

  • Create content faster

    Nio Engine runs at extremely fast, even in editor. The lighting engine is entirely GPU based and it’s core ECS systems allow for maintaining performance in massive scenes and big open worlds.
    Nio Engine projects also compiles extremely fast with build times within the editor happening in a matter of seconds

See it in action: Light Bearers

See it in action: Light Bearers

Early development demo made in a week showing off some of the basic functionality of Nio. For now more of a small 2D game than anything, but this was for me the proof that yes, Nio could ship game, which was a super important goal to reach.