The KZX Engine is my most ambitious and personal long-term project, a custom game engine I began developing at age 14 out of pure curiosity. It was never meant to compete with giants like Unity or Unreal, but to understand them. Over the years, I taught myself how to build render pipelines, scripting interfaces, physics systems, and everything in between.
Unlike Unity or Unreal Engine, KZX is not an editor-based engine. It is code-first, meaning projects are entirely defined through scripting and configuration files without a visual editor. This made it incredibly lightweight and customizable, but also more challenging to work with for larger teams or rapid iteration. The engine was released as freeware (not open-source) for those who wanted to experiment with it.
KZX gained small community interest and external contributions, and in 2022, just before its decommissioning, it proudly received a Stellar Business Award recognizing innovation and commitment in software craftsmanship. Although the engine is now archived, the experience helped shape my knowledge and gave me deep insights into software design, performance optimization, and developer tools.
As the engine's sole architect and lead developer throughout its years, I was responsible for:
Graphics from 2018
Graphics from 2022