EngineD
A reusable engine for first-person shooters, built on Unity. It knows how a gun fires, how a body falls and how an enemy hunts you down. It does not know which guns, which bodies or which enemies: those come from the game.
It is built in two halves. A simulation decides everything that happens, in a steady rhythm of ticks. An adapter turns what the simulation decided into pictures, sound and physics on screen. The simulation never looks at the screen, so the same inputs always give the same game: it can be tested on its own and replayed exactly.
Mechanics, never content
The engine's one rule of scope: it ships the machinery of a shooter, and nothing a player would recognise as a particular game. A game built on EngineD plugs its own weapons, enemies and levels into sockets the engine leaves open, and tunes them with numbers rather than code.
The engine ships
- How a weapon fires, reloads and switches
- How damage is settled, and how bodies come apart
- How enemies see, hear, chase, fight and flee
- Doors, lifts, liquids, portals and ladders
- Drawing, sound, the HUD and menus
A game brings
- Its actual weapons and their numbers
- Its enemies, their looks and their temperaments
- Its pickups, armour and drops
- Its levels, art, sounds and music
- Its story, if it has one
- 60
- simulation ticks every second
- 6
- numbered releases so far, v0.38 to v0.43
Figures as of 2026-10-23.
The systems
Each system has its own sheet, written for readers who do not write code. Start with Life of a shot to see them all work together on a single bullet.
- Simulation: decides what happens
- Adapter: shows and sounds it
- A hit, damage or a warning
One bullet, from the trigger pull to the blood on the wall and the sound in your ears, step by step.
-
Spine
The rhythm everything runs on -
Player
The body you play -
World
The level and its moving parts -
Combat
Shooting, hurting, coming apart- DamageEvery hurt in the game passes through one door, in one fixed order: immunities, weak spots, resistance, armour, then health.
- Weapons and projectilesGuns, rockets, beams, grenades and melee swings: how a weapon fires, what it fires, and what that does in flight.
- Statuses, factions and pickupsBurning, poison and other lasting effects; who is friend or foe; and the health, ammo and weapons lying around to collect.
- GoreBodies that come apart where they are hit, chunks that fly and settle, and the blood and footprints they leave behind.
-
Enemy AI
What enemies do, and why -
Presentation
What you see and hear- Animation and bodies on screenHow the bodies the simulation moves become characters on screen that walk, aim, reload and fall, in first or third person.
- Rendering and effectsMuzzle flashes, impacts, blood marks, liquids and lights: how the adapter chooses what each event looks like and keeps it cheap to draw.
- AudioSounds triggered by what the simulation reports, and how the engine decides which ones play when too many want to.
- UI, HUD and in-world screensThe heads-up display, the weapon wheel, menus and settings, key bindings, and screens you use inside the level itself.
-
Tooling
Building games on it, keeping it working
Status
EngineD is before its first full version. Work began on 28 July 2026, and the engine has been released in numbered versions since late September 2026, so a game being built on it can take each one when it is ready. Nothing about it is frozen yet: a release can still change how things work.
- v0.3828 Sep
- v0.391 Oct
- v0.404 Oct
- v0.417 Oct
- v0.4210 Oct
- v0.4323 Oct
Releases as of 2026-10-23. What changed since is in the changelog.
How it is made
The code is written with AI coding agents, under my close, active direction. I do much of the architectural design myself: how the engine is split, how its systems fit together and what each one must do. I also read the code the agents write and decide how it is built. Layers of automatic tests check the work, and new features are tried out in the Gym, the engine's own test level, which never ships.
Backdoor Rupture is the first game being built on EngineD. It does not run on the engine yet: its gameplay is still to be written.