14 years of building my own 2D game engine

4 encelo 2 8/21/2025, 5:20:05 PM
Fourteen years ago I started writing a 2D game engine as a personal side project. What began as a way to learn has grown into something I've maintained across jobs and countries, through rewrites, feature creep, and shifting technologies.

I recently gave a talk at /dev/games in Rome about what it's been like to maintain it for over a decade, from the technical challenges, the lessons learned, and the community aspects of keeping such a project alive.

Slides: https://encelo.github.io/nCine_14Years_Presentation/

PDF: https://encelo.github.io/nCine_14Years_Presentation/nCine_14Years.pdf

A video recording will be available soon on the conference's YouTube channel.

Comments (2)

andrewmcwatters · 2h ago
Hello, fellow engine developer! nCine is pretty cool. Your engine is one of the ones we evaluate against our own at Planimeter!

It's really cool to see your journey, and also, how long it's taken. There's a lot of growth and learning there that we can relate to.

encelo · 1h ago
Thank you Andrew, I really appreciate a comment from a fellow engine developer! ;)