(GlobalCpp) Inside a Small Game Engine: An Architecture Tour in Modern C++

Description

According to VGInsights, about 10% of games released on Steam in 2024 used a custom engine, but those games represent 41% of units sold. Most "how an engine works" talks come from the AAA end of that distribution. This one comes from the other end of that distribution: a teaching-scale engine, where every system has to be small enough to understand from first principles. The problems are the same as in a big engine, but the smaller surface is what makes the architecture legible. In this talk, we'll walk the spine of the engine in modern C++: allocations and handles in the core, the job system, the graphics abstraction question, the asset pipeline split between pipeline-time and runtime, and scene representation including ECS. We finish on serialization, where C++26 reflection (P2996) offers a path past today's reliance on macros and external code generators.

About the Presenter

Elias Farhan is the Games Programming department at SAE Institute Genève and Program Lead of MAIA at Geneve School of Digital Arts, as well as co-founder of indie game studio Team KwaKwa.