I'm building my own game engine from scratch, Multiverse Engine, & the game it runs, Multiverse. It's 100% my own code, in C++ & Direct3D 12.
I also make free VR ports of retro games (Banjo-Kazooie, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, Sonic Robo Blast 2 & more), & I've spent ten years inside No Man's Sky's engine without ever having its source code.
Everything in this part is mine, from a blank page: the engine, the game & the found footage camcorder.
Multiverse Engine
Multiverse started out in Unreal Engine 5, & UE5 showed me exactly where its ceiling is. The game I want to make lives past that ceiling, so I'm building it a foundation of its own: Multiverse Engine, written from scratch in C++ & Direct3D 12. My own renderer & my own editor, built from the ground up.
Over 175 million triangles in one scene, path-traced in real time with nothing baked, & 0.3 seconds from a cold boot to editing.
The UE5-style editor is just scaffolding while the core comes together. The real goal is a full creation suite in the spirit of Dreams: clay sculpting, gadgets & wires, timelines, puppets, a music suite & eventually VR creation, where you reach in & shape a world by hand.
The rule for every tool: anything that takes 20 steps in another engine should take one here, & you should still be able to open it up & change every part of it. An example: if you want a door to open when the player gets close, you'd just drop an "opens when approached" behavior onto it & you're done. The engine handles the trigger zone, animation, sound & logic, but you can still tweak any of it.
First look: five minutes inside the editor, nothing staged for the camera · YouTube ↗
A room lit by one ceiling panel with the path tracer running live, one texture turned into a full material with real depth in its own studio, & things placed & moved with the whole scene updating on the spot. Rough in places, & moving fast.
Already running
Real-time path tracing, nothing baked
From-scratch renderer & editor
HDR with ACES & AgX
Image-based skies & live look grading
Portals built into the core instead of faked
Built to run on weak GPUs first, then scale up
Background imports, so the editor never freezes
A plain-English tooltip on every single control
Rifts at the core
The world beyond a tear in reality renders live, with its own light, fog & sky, in the same frame as the world you're standing in. General-purpose engines have to fake that, so I shaped mine around it from the start.
Dreams-style creation, in VR
Building worlds should feel the way Dreams on PS4 felt... instant, tactile & alive. It's growing into a full VR editor where you reach in & shape a world by hand, with no bake step between you & the result.
Photoreal first, style as data
The baseline is physically based light. Every dimension's look (grade, fog, palette) is dialed on top, so one world can be painterly & the next raw, from the same scene.
VR from day one
VR is being built in right now, with the same per-eye obsession as my VR ports. Flatscreen & VR are two views of the same world... neither is a port of the other.
Twenty years of studying how shipped engines work (mostly to mod them) taught me where they all make the same trade-offs. The knowledge carried over, their code didn't. Mine gets to make different trade-offs, shaped around the things Multiverse can't compromise on.
Multiverse Engine is 100% my own code, written from a blank page. No UE5 fork, no borrowed runtime, & nothing taken from any other engine or game, Hello Games' & Media Molecule's included. I have a lot of respect for the engines I learned from, Multiverse just needs one built for it.
Inside the engine
The level editor: the path tracer running real-time, one ceiling panel lighting the whole roomGodrays: path-traced shafts through a slotted wall, nothing bakedThe model viewer: a ship staged under three-point studio lighting
Multiverse, the game
Same name as my No Man's Sky project further down, but this is a separate, brand-new game built on my own engine.
Multiverse is my own commercial game, built solo on my own engine. It's a flatscreen & VR dimensional exploration game inspired by prerelease No Man's Sky, golden age sci-fi & liminal spaces, with a found footage feel. It has space travel, but it isn't just a space game.
It's a multiverse of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 dimensions (18 quintillion), each with its own rules & look, & each dimension can hold up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets of its own. Every one is meant to be totally unique, so any style I name below is just an example... a droplet in an ocean of possibilities.
What to expect: wonder, mystery, & sometimes suspense or horror. Some dimensions are calm & mesmerizing, some are quietly uncanny, & a few are genuinely unsettling, the way the deep Backrooms are.
Thallume: a throwaway look test from the UE5 days · YouTube ↗
Thallume was a quick test from back when the game was in UE5... I wanted to see if that prerelease NMS feel could be evoked using none of Hello Games' content or code, & it could. The real game looks & plays differently, & it now grows on Multiverse Engine. The HUD is my own, a nod to prerelease NMS, & it stays out of your way.
Built solo, on my own engine
This is the biggest test of Multiverse Engine: a whole game, made by one person, on an engine I wrote myself. Every rift between worlds is real. Both worlds render at once, live, each with its own light & color, & there's no loading between them. It's built into the engine core, not faked, & it's the reason the engine exists.
This is the vision, not the finished game. It's early, but it's moving fast, & I've spent about a decade prototyping & iterating to get ready for exactly this, so it's not a pipe dream.
A few of the styles (inspiration only, never copies)
Golden-age sci-fi. Inspired by the classic space paintings and book covers of that era. Warm light in cool air, huge planets, tiny life, civilizations that look like they actually work.
Prerelease No Man’s Sky wonder. Glowing darks, one dominant color per world, planets sunk in haze low in the sky.
Frutiger Aero. That bright, glassy, optimistic 2005 to 2013 look.
Early CG, the Bryce 3D era. Mirror-still water, giant planets, chrome and glass, one impossible thing in the frame.
Dreamcore. Lavender and magenta skies, a soft glow on everything, colored fog as the air, old tape grain. A white monument opens into a flooded blue maze, then a slightly wrong yellow living room, then a pink place to rest.
Surreal. Inspired by Codex Seraphinianus, Fantastic Planet and Gandahar. Creatures with real anatomy, families and rituals. Impossible, but studied.
Painterly, glitchy digital, real life... and endless more that don’t exist yet.
Each keeps its own identity unless I blend them on purpose.
Worlds act on you
What a world is made of decides how it plays, so nothing is hardcoded and you never know what to expect. A world can change how you move, what you can do, even how you see and hear. Something you eat, touch or breathe might give you an ability, a toxin or a hallucination, and the same thing can do something completely different in the next world. You find the uses by doing. Nobody holds your hand.
Real places, not props
Worlds are being designed to have real presence, interactivity and physics, never to feel like theme park props. You should feel like you’re in them, not looking at them.
Portals can be anything
A door, a tear in a wall, a hole in the floor, an object... Both worlds render live, each with its own light and color, with no loading between them. It’s built into the engine core, not faked. The plan goes further: carry things through and they keep behaving like they should, knock something through and it falls into the other world’s gravity, and things can react differently on the other side because every world has its own rules. Even weather can cross the threshold, like frost where a hot world meets a cold one.
Worlds within worlds
Bubble worlds, a room full of mini oceans, floating islands, whole worlds inside other worlds, each with its own rules.
Liminal levels & Pick-a-Door halls
Malls, offices, pools, motels, suburbs, flooded workplaces, water parks... places that feel almost familiar. Some carry found-footage dread, some are bright and gentle, and peaceful ones exist too. Some loop on purpose, some only let you out if you beat a high score or finish a task, and some are simply somewhere to rest. Some are rulebooks, like Level 911 (a fogbound road, a stranded bus and a warm hotel), where the rules change with the time of day. Sometimes you stumble through a portal, and sometimes a hall of doors makes you choose, Pick-a-Door style, with doors that might be honest, vague or outright lies, and what you learn stays with you.
Every sense, flatscreen & VR
The game is being built to appeal to your senses: eye tracking, immersive haptics, environments you can feel, spatialized audio and more. Flatscreen and VR are two views of the same world.
Create, if you want to
An optional Dreams-inspired create mode will let you live-shape the Multiverse, with changes that persist. It’s an option, never a requirement.
Found footage, never menus
You see it all through found footage, a camcorder you carry through impossible places. It sways with you & picks up bits of the next world bleeding through like VHS interference. No XP, no quest markers & no grind. Exploration is a big part of it, but it doesn't have to be a walking sim (though you could play it like that)... what you discover along the way lets you play the game in ways you didn't expect.
A day in the Multiverse might go like this
You’re walking a creepy hall and find a portal that only opens if you work out how to trigger it. Behind it is an arcade of games that feel like legendary developers made them, maybe even a browser, though things might work differently there. Out the back, a rift drops you into a bright, genuinely uplifting Frutiger Aero dimension.
Then space, but imagine space as the ocean. You drift through it instead of flying, asteroids bounce you around like rubber, strange creatures move through the dark the way sea life does, and the only air comes from planets, each one a source you swim back to. You surface on one that breathes for you, with surreal, otherworldly environments. Clearly not Earth.
Later you noclip through the floor of an interior (slipping out of bounds, the classic backrooms way) into an empty Las Vegas style place with an underground water park you can actually play in. A portal drops you into a survival house you wall yourself into while entities try to break in, until you twist a key in mid air (it was in a drawer, and Multiverse isn’t meant to be grindy) and a doorway opens to anywhere else... and you venture into the unknown.
That’s one journey, merely a drop in an ocean of possibilities. Tomorrow could be something else entirely. Nothing is forced, nothing is linear.
Videos that shaped the feel
Each one opens on YouTube. Inspiration only, none of it is in the game.
Early pictures of getting the infinite universe going, & Blender recreations of prerelease No Man’s Sky planets. The comparisons are just art style practice, to see if I could recreate the style before making something unique. This isn’t the definitive version, & I expect it to get much more exciting & much more polished.
Early flight test: a ship gliding over snow-covered mountainsEarly work in progress: getting the infinite universe goingArt style practice: Blender recreations of prerelease No Man’s Sky scenes beside their references
I want you to get lost in it & forget reality for a while, so immersive & packed with depth that you never want to leave, with replay value I’ll keep adding to. It’s my passion project & the embodiment of so many things I’ve become passionate about, & it’s also a commercial game built on everything I’ve learned over the past decade. I’m willing to spend the rest of my life polishing it until it’s truly flawless & remarkable, as long as I can afford to.
To be clear: no reverse engineered code, assets or content, & no property of Hello Games, Media Molecule or anyone else, is in the Multiverse game or Multiverse Engine. My VR mods (the free retro game ports further down) were fun side projects & a good way to learn how to deliver content people enjoy, fix bugs & listen to players. If you’ve liked the innovation in them, this is several notches up, with more effort, innovation & creativity than all of them combined. It all feeds back into Multiverse.
Glimpses
A hotel lobby whose ceiling has torn open to an alien sky.
Bioluminescent coral beneath a pink sky with three moons, glimpsed through a crack.
An abandoned swimming pool, slowly consumed by alien growth.
A school hallway that becomes alien the further you walk it.
Impossible things from the Multiverse’s own art pipeline. The surreal side is grown into the worlds themselves (anatomy, families, materials) rather than painted on after.
The painters, films & places that taught me what wonder looks like: golden age sci-fi, surreal naturalists & the quiet dread of liminal spaces. The stars drifting behind this text are my own, procedural & grown from shader math.
Golden age sci-fi
Chris Foss, John Harris, Tim White, Roger Dean, Richard Powers, Syd Mead, Moebius
Surreal & natural
Ernst Haeckel, Codex Seraphinianus, Fantastic Planet, Gandahar
Liminal & unease
The Backrooms, liminal spaces, found footage
Worlds you step into
Dreams (PS4), prerelease No Man's Sky (2013 to 2015)
Named artists are credited as influences only. Each painting belongs to its creator, & the mood studies above are style references. The starfield is my own.
Found Footage
A found footage camcorder you can walk around with in your browser. Record a clip, rewind it, jump back in & record over yourself.
It's a rough prototype, not even in engine yet & not the game. I'm trying out ideas in the browser before they earn a place in the engine, so expect rough edges. I update it often, so it won't look the same next time you open it, & the sounds are stand-ins for now.
One small exe that installs my VR ports & keeps them updated. Pick a game, hit Play: it grabs that game's official PC release, applies my VR patch on your machine, & uses your own copy wherever the game needs one.
Every port is a real stereo 3D fork. The whole game renders inside the headset, not on a flat screen floating in front of you, & it runs on any PCVR / OpenXR runtime (Quest Link, Virtual Desktop, SteamVR). Send to Quest installs the standalone build straight to a plugged-in headset, with the game data copied over from your own PC.
I don't sell anything built on another company's game. Every VR port & mod is free for everyone: no paywall, nothing early for supporters, no membership.
No game files.
Nothing I publish contains a game's files or code: no ROMs, no game data, no art or music from the games. What I share is my own code, applied on your machine, & each game runs from its official release or a copy you own.
Unofficial.
These are fan projects, not affiliated with or endorsed by the companies that own the games. Every trademark belongs to its owner.
What I do sell.
Only my own work. Multiverse, the game I'm building from scratch on my own engine, will be sold one day. Support pays for my time & never unlocks a port or mod.
Sonic the Hedgehog in 3D
This is the real Sonic 1 running from your own Genesis game file. My system reads the game's art, level data & live state & builds every zone in 3D around it as you play, while the original game runs underneath & still decides everything. The game's own girders, loops & rings included.
You can play it exactly like the original, or walk off the path & explore. It's in development & I'm polishing it daily.
Star Light Zone's look is inspired by Liris-San's paintings: the starry sky, the crescent moon, the glowing lamps & the city lit up below. Everything else is the game running in 3D & painted in real time, nothing edited after.
Spring Yard Zone starts from Lapper's repaint of the background, with my 3D recreation of it from the same spot beside it, then the city & the valley around it from other angles.
Spring Yard Zone, painted live as you play. Top left: Lapper's repaint of the background. Top right: my 3D recreation from the same spot. See the post ↗Star Light Zone, painted live as you play. Top left: the Liris-San painting that set the look. See the post ↗Every zone, built from the game's own art. See the post ↗
Bomberman 64 · Hero · Second AttackMystical Ninja Starring GoemonGex TrilogyLots more
Inside No Man's Sky
A free fan project. Ten years inside its engine, with no source code.
NMS Multiverse
My No Man's Sky project, not the standalone game above. Same name, different beast.
I'm fundamentally rewriting No Man's Sky's core engine systems without source code. Through ten years of reverse engineering at the assembly/C++ level I'm rebuilding terrain rendering, shader systems, procedural generation & the whole visual pipeline. This isn't modding, it's engine reconstruction.
On top of it runs a live GUI to reshape the universe in real time, a modular plugin system & deep modding: systems the base game never shipped with. No Man's Sky runs on Hello Games' own engine, Skyscraper. I work inside it, rewriting the parts that don't fit Multiverse & adding what was never there.
To be clear about what that means: it's a third-party tool that runs alongside a copy of No Man's Sky you already own. It contains none of Hello Games' code & ships none of it, every line is mine. Studying how the game works internally is what makes it compatible, the same as any mod. It's written in C++ & assembly at its core, with Python, & some tools in C#.
Free fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Hello Games. Fan project notice ↑
More than 30,000 hours in No Man's Sky, over twenty years of reverse engineering, & ten of them inside its engine.
NMS Multiverse: early teaser · YouTube ↗Planet editor: reshaping the universe in real time
One month of it, June 2025
One month inside No Man's Sky's engine, documented: rewritten terrain rendering, 220+ shader effects, an optional Film Gate that makes the game look painted (like you're playing through an old TV or camera), cosmic creatures grown from shader math, solar systems with up to 20 suns, & the dev tools behind them.
No Man's Sky: Multiverse, a month documentedRewritten terrain rendering: higher fidelityA solar system with six sunsFilm Gate: like playing through an old TVPrerelease-style HUD (2013 to 2014), reimaginedStrange new planetary ring typesNew stars, suns, nebulae & crescent planetsHundreds of new star typesProcedural 'Ring Nebula' space effectsFractal visuals & painterly nebulae (1/2)Fractal visuals & painterly nebulae (2/2)Space Manta: grown from shader mathSpace Jellyfish: grown from shader mathTerrain Array Texture Editor (custom dev tool)Documenting NMS's shader systemsSci-fi painting: Machaon ship (1/3)Sci-fi painting: Machaon ship (2/3)Sci-fi painting: Machaon ship (3/3)New Eridu-inspired planetLens distortion & luminous darksPerspective atmospheric fogCosmic Eye (1/2)Cosmic Eye (2/2)Space-to-planet textural consistency
Log
Big milestones only. The day to day progress goes up on X & Discord.
Sonic 3D
Sonic the Hedgehog is now a 3D world
Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis) is now a 3D world you can wander through, built zone by zone from your own copy as you play while the original game runs underneath. Still polishing daily, more soon.
There's a video up now: five minutes inside the Multiverse Engine editor as it stands today, just me moving through it with nothing staged for the camera, so you can see where it's at.
What's in it: a room lit by one panel in the ceiling with the path tracer running live & nothing baked, one texture turned into a full material with real depth in its own studio, & things placed & moved with the whole scene answering back on the spot. Rough in places, & every bit of it is running now rather than planned.
The engine is being built to carry Multiverse, the standalone game. Past that, the aim is an engine you don't have to be an engineer to use: plain English everywhere, results you see the moment you act, & a Dreams-style creation suite that's in development now. NMS Multiverse is still very much active. This is just the road to the things a No Man's Sky mod was never going to let me build.
One small exe that installs my VR ports onto your own copies of the games & keeps them updated. Pick a game, press install & it's ready to play in VR, with standalone Quest versions coming.
No ports or game files are hosted anywhere. Every install grabs the official vanilla release plus my patch, applied on your machine.
Multiverse started out in Unreal Engine 5, & UE5 showed me exactly where its ceiling is. The game I want to make lives past that ceiling, so it's getting a foundation of its own.
Multiverse Engine is written from scratch in C++ & Direct3D 12... my own renderer, my own editor, 100% my own code rather than a fork of UE5 or anything else. The whole thing is shaped around the one idea it can't compromise on: rifts.
The world beyond a rift renders live, with its own light, fog & sky, in the same frame as the world you're standing in.
Twenty years of pulling shipped engines apart taught me how they work & where they all make the same trade-offs. Mine gets to make different ones, shaped around what Multiverse needs.
Support
I'm one person building a game engine & a game from scratch, & porting retro games into VR on the side. Support buys me time to work on all of it. It never unlocks a port or mod, it's just fuel for the work, & your name goes in the credits when the game ships.
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