Welcome to Mini Engine With Games: a student-friendly C++20 / DirectX 11 mini-engine

[SyperOlao]

👋 Welcome

Mini Engine With Games is a small educational C++20 / DirectX 11 mini-engine with several playable demos running on top of one shared runtime.

The project is aimed at students and beginner/intermediate graphics programmers who want to study how a compact game runtime can be structured without jumping straight into Unreal Engine-sized complexity.

This is not a commercial engine.
It is a readable learning project for game architecture, DirectX 11 rendering, ECS-style gameplay, audio, UI, debug tools, and small playable demos.

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What is inside?

The repository currently includes:

• a shared Core runtime;
• a common IGame interface;
• multiple independent game/demo modules;
• 2D and 3D rendering;
• forward and deferred rendering paths;
• shadow mapping and cascade debug views;
• GBuffer debug visualization;
• GPU particles;
• DirectXTK audio integration;
• lightweight ECS-style gameplay systems;
• playable demos: Pong, SolarSystem, Katamari, and LightingTest.

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Who is this project for?

This project may be useful if you are learning:

• C++ game engine architecture;
• DirectX 11 basics;
• render pipeline organization;
• simple ECS-style gameplay systems;
• how to separate shared engine code from game-specific modules;
• how to build small playable demos on top of one runtime.

It is intentionally small enough to read, modify, and break without needing a whole team of engine programmers and three existential crises.

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Useful links

• Repository: /SyperOlao/Mini-Engine-With-Games
• README: /SyperOlao/Mini-Engine-With-Games#readme
• Releases: /SyperOlao/Mini-Engine-With-Games/releases
• Issues: /SyperOlao/Mini-Engine-With-Games/issues

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Good first discussion topics

Feel free to open a discussion if you want to talk about:

• how the engine architecture is organized;
• how the render pipeline works;
• how the ECS-style scene layer is structured;
• DirectX 11 / CMake / vcpkg build problems;
• ideas for new small demos;
• student-friendly improvements;
• code cleanup or documentation improvements.

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Current roadmap

Planned improvements:

• runtime demo selection menu;
• rename legacy PingPong.exe target to MiniEngineWithGames.exe;
• prebuilt Windows release archive;
• more tutorial-style documentation;
• better beginner-friendly issues;
• more rendering/debug examples.

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How to contribute

Small contributions are welcome, especially:

• documentation fixes;
• build fixes;
• small rendering examples;
• debug tools;
• gameplay systems;
• cleanup/refactoring;
• student-friendly explanations.

If you are a student learning C++ graphics or game-dev architecture, this repo is meant to be something you can actually open, build, inspect, and modify.

[SyperOlao]

-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:/dev/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET=x64-windows