canary engine · in active development

A proprietary engine.
Built for games.

Canary is a C++20 / DirectX 12 game engine, built from scratch — no third-party runtime, no engine-for-hire detour. One focus: shipping games, milestone by milestone, in the open.

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stack

C++20 · DX12

HLSL · GLFW · glm

milestones shipped

M01 — M07 · Living Engine

focus

Games, exclusively

No B2B, no detours

platform

Windows

Visual Studio toolchain

scroll · see what's built ↓

what's built

Engine.

Every system below is running today — not a mockup, not a plan.

rendering

Gamma-correct forward pipeline

Blinn-Phong lighting, textured & glTF-loaded meshes, directional shadow mapping with PCF, procedural sky — running in an sRGB-correct DX12 pipeline.

scene & data

Data-driven scenes, stable IDs

JSON scene descriptors, dynamic spawn/destroy with a stable id→index map — no dangling references when entities come and go mid-frame.

input & feel

Action-based input, gamepad-ready

Platform input (GLFW) is fully abstracted behind engine key codes. Gamepad support via the SDL mapping database, plus time-scale and pause built in.

audio

Dedicated audio engine

A PIMPL-isolated AudioEngine service on top of miniaudio — pitch-varied footsteps, jump/land/pickup cues, ambient loops.

progress · shipped in order

Progress.

Milestone by milestone, each one shipped before the next begins.

shipped

7/ ongoing

✓

M02

First scene, orbital camera

Five rotating cubes on screen, WASD/QE orbital camera. The first real 3D pipeline.

✓

M03

Lighting, textures, glTF

Blinn-Phong lighting, textured materials, glTF mesh loading, JSON scenes, ImGui debug panel, mouse look.

✓

M04

Engine/game boundary

The engine and the game became separate things. First playable: a third-person character controller with collision and a real win condition.

✓

M05

Shadows & sRGB pipeline

Gamma-correct rendering, directional shadow mapping, procedural sky, resizable and borderless-fullscreen windows.

✓

M06

Audio engine

A dedicated AudioEngine service; full sound design pass on the first playable game.

✓

M07

Living Engine

Action-based input with gamepad support, time scale & pause, and a fully dynamic scene lifecycle with stable IDs.

→

Playable game content

Continuing past M07 with one goal: demonstrable, playable game content built on what's already running.

who's building this

Meet the dev.

Canary is built solo — one engine, one commit at a time.

Douglas Mendes

Solo developer · Canary Engine

Building Canary from scratch to go deep on low-level systems and graphics programming — and because making games, not tooling for other industries, is the point. Currently studying Advanced Programming for AAA Video Games at UPC School, Barcelona.

C++20 / DirectX 12 UPC School · Barcelona Terrassa, Catalonia

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A proprietary engine. Built for games.