I'm building my own game engine & the games it powers, and I reverse-engineer closed-source games to make them more immersive... without ever having their source code.
Get lost in other worlds.
My focus now is Multiverse Engine, my own engine in C++ and Direct3D 12, built to power Multiverse, a dimensional-exploration game. Around them: whole console generations (N64, GameCube, Wii, Dreamcast, PlayStation and more) brought into real per-eye VR, and major systems of No Man's Sky reshaped from the inside.
The retro games I bring into VR, and the worlds I build from scratch, are after the same thing: making people feel truly there, in places that could never exist.
Front and center: Multiverse Engine and the game it exists for, both in active development behind the scenes, with more to share as they grow. See where it's headed →
Released · Free
Out now. Free to play.
Each one is a real per-eye stereoscopic fork: the whole game renders in the headset, not on a flat screen floating in front of you.
One small exe that installs my VR ports onto your own copies of the games and keeps them updated. Pick a game, hit Play: it grabs the official PC port and applies my VR patch on your machine. Plug in a Quest and Send to Quest installs the standalone build straight to the headset. No ports or game files are hosted anywhere.
A multi-platform emulator that turns classic 2D games into fully three-dimensional voxel worlds: on your monitor as a free-camera 3D diorama, or in VR with full 6DOF. Depth is read from the original hardware itself: scroll planes, parallax and priority data become real geometry automatically, with zero per-title setup. Sega Genesis is first, & more consoles follow on the same pipeline.
RetroVox: early in-progress previewThe depth is real: every parallax layer sits at its own distance
In development · Flagship
In development
N64 XR
A standalone Nintendo 64 emulator I'm building with native OpenXR. It already runs flat, and renders inside the headset, but true per-eye VR isn't wired up yet. This is an early, in-progress build.
Multiverse began 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, written from scratch in C++ and Direct3D 12... my own renderer & my own editor, built from the ground up.
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 the things Multiverse can't compromise on.
Multiverse Engine is 100% my own code, written from a blank page... no UE5 fork or borrowed runtime anywhere underneath. Those engines are what I'm out to surpass, so I'm not building on top of them.
First look · The editor as it stands
See it move.
Five minutes inside the editor: 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, & objects placed and moved with the whole scene updating on the spot.
Nothing staged for the camera. Rough in places, and moving fast.
Multiverse Engine: a first look at the editor · YouTube ↗
175M+
Triangles in one scene
Real-time
Path-traced, nothing baked
0.3s
Cold boot to editing
Rifts at the core
The whole engine is built so the world beyond a tear in reality renders live, with its own light, fog & sky. 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 and shape a world by hand, with no bake step between you and the result. You sculpt the real thing & it responds right away.
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 and the next raw, from the same scene.
The headset is a first-class display
VR is being built in right now, with the same per-eye obsession as my retro-VR forks. Flatscreen & VR are two views of the same world... neither is a port of the other.
Already running
C++ · Direct3D 12From-scratch renderer & editorHDR pipeline · ACES & AgXImage-based skiesLive look gradingReal-time path tracerOptimization-first · from weak GPUs upBackground imports · the editor never freezesTooltips on every single controlReal-time everything
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
The standalone game · On Multiverse Engine
Multiverse
Shares a name with my No Man's Sky project below, but this is a separate, brand-new game, built on my own engine.
It's deeply inspired by No Man's Sky, but it aims to be far more: a flatscreen & VR dimensional-exploration game where space travel bleeds into interdimensional travel.
Prerelease-NMS wonder and mid-century sci-fi, blended with liminal spaces and a found-footage feel. The multiverse itself is the main character... unstable, merging, alive. The focus is presence & awe over progression, so there's no XP or checklists to chase.
The clip, Thallume, was a throwaway test from the game's UE5 chapter... I wanted to see if that prerelease-NMS feel could be evoked using none of Hello Games' content or code, and it could. The real game looks and plays differently, and it now grows on Multiverse Engine. Its HUD is built from scratch, a quiet nod to prerelease-NMS design principles. It stays out of your way.
Thallume: a throwaway look-test from the UE5 chapter · YouTube ↗
The multiverse is the character
Unstable. Merging. Alive.
Dimensions are layers of one multiverse rather than separate levels, bleeding into each other through rifts: jagged tears in reality, never tidy doorways. You never know whether the next room will be more familiar or more alien. And every rift is real... the world beyond it renders live through the tear, like a window into a place that's really there.
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.
What it feels like
01Familiarityyou know this place
02Wrongnesssomething is off
03Discoverya tear, a bleed-through
04Wonderthe world beyond
05Uneasethe boundaries fail
06Awetwo realities at once
Four layers, one world
Golden-age sci-fi
Warm, analog & painterly, like stepping into a Chris Foss canvas... the opposite of cold, blue, modern sci-fi.
Surrealism
Strangeness baked into the biology itself... impossible materials, scale that feels wrong, creatures that fit no category.
Liminal unease
Empty pools, corridors that never end, & that quiet feeling of being watched by the place itself.
Dreamcore
Impossible lavender-to-magenta skies, colored fog that blends everything together, & the analog grain of a dream you half remember.
Alien wonderlands
Worlds worth getting lost in.
Golden-age sci-fi you can walk around in... each dimension is a painting you can stand inside.
The surrealism is grown into the worlds themselves rather than painted on afterward. A growing field of specimens, rendered from the Multiverse’s own art pipeline.
No XPNo quest markersNo grindNot a walking simNot cold, modern sci-fi
A journey into the unknown
For the explorer in you.
Some dimensions are calm and mesmerizing, others quietly uncanny, and a few are genuinely unsettling, the way the deep Backrooms are. Wonder leads, but it isn't the only thing out there. Golden-age sci-fi, liminal spaces, the Backrooms, prerelease No Man's Sky. They all share one pull: venturing into the unknown. That's the heart of it.
You see it all through found footage... a recording device carried through impossible places. The camera is a physical object in your hands: it breathes, it sways, it catches fragments of the next world bleeding through like VHS interference. There are no menus or systems to manage. You simply exist somewhere you don't want to leave.
What feeds it
The lineage.
The Multiverse is built on the painters, films & places that taught me what wonder looks like: golden-age sci-fi, surreal naturalists, and the quiet dread of liminal space. The stars drifting behind this text are my own... procedural, grown from shader math, my own small continuation of it.
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
Named artists are credited as influences only. Each painting belongs to its creator. The mood studies above are style references. The starfield is original to the Multiverse.
Fan project · No Man's Sky
The NMS Multiverse
My No Man's Sky project, not the standalone game above. Same name, different beast.
A fan project that overhauls No Man's Sky from the inside. I'm fundamentally rewriting its core engine systems (terrain rendering, shaders, procedural generation, the whole visual pipeline) through ten years of reverse-engineering at the assembly level, with no source code. At that depth it stops being modding & becomes engine reconstruction.
On top of it runs a live GUI to reshape the universe in real time, a modular plugin system, and 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 and adding what was never there.
In a single month it gained 220+ programmable shader effects, an optional Film Gate that makes the game look painted, procedural cosmic creatures built from shader math, solar systems with up to 20 suns, hundreds of new star types, and a custom Terrain Array Texture Editor.
It's written in C++ and assembly at its core, with Python, and some tools in C#.
NMS Multiverse: early teaser · YouTube ↗Planet editor: reshaping the universe in real time
Dev log · June 2025 · NMS Multiverse
A month of engine reconstruction.
One month inside No Man's Sky's engine, documented: rewritten terrain rendering, 220+ shader effects, procedural cosmic creatures, perspective fog, and the dev tools behind them.
No Man's Sky: Multiverse, a month documentedNMS Multiverse: very early teaserRewritten terrain rendering: higher fidelityA solar system with six sunsFilm Gate: like playing through an old TVPrerelease-style HUD (2013–14), 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
Devlog
The log.
Progress notes from inside the build, posted as I go.
Release
F-Zero X VR is out
F-Zero X is on the hub now, in native per-eye VR. The whole game renders inside the headset at your headset's own rate instead of the game's, with all 30 racers on track. Third person, first person, & a diorama mode that shrinks the track down to a miniature, the whole race running right in front of you. The spin attack whirls the view with your machine. Motion controllers, & a VR menu inside the game's own pause menu where every option moves the world live while you change it, so nothing needs a restart to try. There's a cheats page in there too.
This build goes out with a patch round already in it. Quitting a Grand Prix & starting another one used to leave the menus alive but deaf on the second visit, & they listen every time now. The VR menu is split into big readable pages, with HUD & camera each getting their own screen instead of one crowded list, & a RESET ALL row that puts every dial back to stock in one press. There's a dial for how far the spin cam goes, too, if it ever costs you corners.
Bring your own F-Zero X ROM (US). The game asks once & remembers it. Thanks to Zorkats for G-Diffuser, the PC port all of this is built on.
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, and 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 simply the road to the things a No Man's Sky mod was never going to let me build.
Diddy Kong Racing is on the hub now, in native per-eye VR. The whole game renders inside the headset at your headset's own rate instead of the game's, with third person, first person from the driver's seat, a diorama that shrinks the track to a tabletop, & a theater screen. Motion controllers, & a VR menu inside the game's own pause menu where every option moves the world live while you change it, so nothing needs a restart to try. There's a cheats page in there too: unlock everything with one press, plus the classic magic codes as plain toggles.
A first patch round already went out with it. The results screen after a race reads properly in VR instead of the world folding into a box, scenery & effects stop popping in at the edges of your vision, looking behind in first person shows what's actually behind you, & third person got its own camera height & slide, kept separate from the first person seat.
Bring your own Diddy Kong Racing ROM (US 1.1 or EU 1.1). The game asks once & remembers it. Thanks to akratch for Golden Balloon, the PC port all of this is built on.
Hub 1.0.7 is out, and new patch rounds went out for the games, clearing a pile of reported bugs. Mario Kart 64's track surfaces no longer break apart and smear in VR, Ring Racers lost the big black panel in the headset and the blurry picture, Super Mario 64 starts on every PC now, and Banjo-Kazooie's notes and jiggies no longer turn invisible. In the hub you can pick where your games install, and changelogs open right at the game that just updated.
Every download now has its checksum and a VirusTotal report on the release page, and I'm working on getting the exe code signed so the Windows unknown publisher warning goes away for good.
One small exe that installs my VR ports onto your own copies of the games and keeps them updated. Mario Kart 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario 64, Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers, Star Fox 64 and Sonic Robo Blast 2 are all on it, with standalone Quest versions coming for each - Mario Kart 64 and Super Mario 64 are in so far.
No ports or game files are hosted anywhere. Every install grabs the official vanilla release plus my patch, applied on your machine.
Banjo-Kazooie now runs natively in VR through the Lighthouse PC port. Full per-eye stereo with head tracking, four view modes - third person, an immersive first person where you are the bear and walk where you look, a diorama that shrinks whole levels to a tabletop miniature, and a theater screen - with motion controllers, an in-game VR options menu drawn in the game's own dialog font, and every knob tunable from inside the headset.
Download and run: unzip, drop a US 1.0 ROM next to the exe, and the extraction wizard does the rest on first launch. Headset on, it boots into VR; headset off, it's the normal flat game.
Grab it via the hub: https://github.com/RaYRoD-TV/MVRH/releases/latest
Release
Ring Racers VR is out
Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers now runs natively in VR. Full stereo at your headset's resolution, four view modes (third person, first person, theater, and a diorama that shrinks the whole track to a miniature you race over), with VR controllers, rumble, and every option tunable from inside the headset.
Download and run: unzip the full bundle, launch, and it boots straight into VR when a headset is on. Headset off, it's the normal flat game.
Grab it via the hub: https://github.com/RaYRoD-TV/MVRH/releases/latest
Site
A place to follow the build
This is the log: short notes from inside the work, posted as I go. Engine progress, rift experiments, the things that break and the things that finally click.
If you want to help keep the lights on while the multiverse gets made, there's now a support section right here on the site. Everything on the site stays free... support simply buys the hours that move the engine forward.
More soon.
Engine
Why Multiverse is getting its own engine
Multiverse began 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, Dreams, 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... a window into a place that's really there.
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.
Support the work
Back the build.
I'm one person building a game engine and a game from scratch, and regularly porting retro and flatscreen games into real, per-eye VR. What support actually buys is the thing that moves all of it forward: time. No paywalls, no locked dimensions. Just fuel for the work, and your name in the credits when it ships.
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