Esoterica Prototype Game Engine
Esoterica Engine is an MIT licensed prototype game engine framework. It’s intended for use either as a proprietary engine starter pack, a technology demonstrator, an educational tool or an R&D framework. The goal of Esoterica is to provide a solid and robust starting point for folks that are looking to build their own tech or transition off of existing tech. It provides a lot of the boring and time consuming boilerplate systems (reflection, serialization, resource management, math, etc…) as well as a tool framework allowing people to rapidly build their own tool/editors.
We need to be clear that Esoterica is NOT an off the shelf game engine that you can just take and work with. It is intended for technical teams that have the ability to extend and build upon it.
Important Note: Stability
Esoterica is a prototype engine that’s being developed in our spare time and as such there will likely be bugs and crashes (primarily with the tooling side). It is not intended as a stable production tool. If you encounter any crashes or bugs, please file issues and we’ll try to get to them as soon as we can.
Open Source Not Open Contribution
Esoterica is not a product and so there wont be any formal releases or versions. As such, we are not looking for any feature requests, nor are we looking for large PR contributions. Any feature requests or large PR will be rejected. That said, please feel free to create issues for bugs, clearly broken/incomplete pieces of code or for general questions.
The level editing experience is intentionally barebones and rough. In our experience, level editing workflows and tools are incredibly subjective. There is no way to provide tools or workflows that will work for everyone. It will also go against the goal of Esoterica, which is to be a starting point for custom engine development. If a team wants to use Esoterica as a base we want to provide the simplest base for them to build whatever tooling they need for their team and their game.
We are providing some tools in a more polished form like the animation tools and ragdoll editor. This is because we believe that this area is a significantly less subjective field as the problem is better defined and constrained. This makes it easier to build tooling and guide folks down a specific tooling path.
The import pipeline is currently a bit rough from a front-end experience, this is being iterated and played with currently to see if we can find a balance between simplicity and the relatively painful importing other engines provide.
Documentation
As Esoterica is constantly being iterated and worked upon, it becomes hard to provide any documentation that isnt immediately out of date. Additionally, it becomes even less relevant for people forking it to build their own engine with. The code itself is heavily commented and written to be as readable as possible, this is how we intended to provide documentation moving forward.
We do have highlevel docs for the renderer here: https://docs.esotericaengine.com
And we have several presentations that cover the high level decisions regarding the entity model and the animation systems here: https://www.esotericaengine.com/docs
Help Needed: Sample Game
If really you do wish to contribute, we do need some help. We are looking for folks to help us build out a simple sample game that we can include with the project.
We are looking for the following:
- A technical animator to build out a locomotion and combat anim set.
- A technical character artist to build out some test characters, as well as help define the character tech pipelines (deformation, cloth, procedural bones).
More details can be found here: https://www.esotericaengine.com/contribute
What’s included
Screenshots
| Resource Pipeline |
Basic Editor |
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| Animation Graph |
Ragdoll Editor |
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Requirements
- Visual Studio 2026 (18.6.1+)
- Windows 11
- External Dependencies - Available from the releases section
Building Esoterica
Esoterica uses vanilla msbuild for its build system. There are a set of property sheets that control all the build settings for Esoterica in the “code/property sheets” folder.
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Get the external dependencies set up: there are two ways to do this:
- Run the
DownloadDependencies.bat script found in the root folder
- Manually download the external dependencies archive and extract into the Esoterica root folder (X:/Esoterica Path/). You should end up with ‘X:/Esoterica Path/External/’
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Open the solution “Esoterica.sln”
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Manually rebuild the “Esoterica.Scripts.Reflect” project (under the “0. Scripts” solution folder) - this will generate all the required Esoterica reflection code needed for the project to compile.
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Build the solution
Applications
Easiest way to get started, is just set the “Esoterica.Applications.Editor” as the startup project and hit run. If you want to run the engine, use the “Esoterica.Applications.Engine” project with the “-map data://path_to_map.map” argument.
- Engine - this is the standalone Esoterica engine client
- Editor - This is the Esoterica editor
- Resource Server - This is a standalone application that will compile and provide resources to the various Esoterica applications
- Reflector - This generates the Esoterica reflection data
- Resource Compiler - This processes resource compilation requests
- Tester - Empty console app used for random testing
Third-party libraries
Esoterica would not exist without the open-source projects below. Third-party code remains under its own license, not the MIT license of the engine.
Runtime and data
Rendering and simulation
Networking, profiling and debugging
Fonts and icons
The Material Design Icons header (Code/Base/Imgui/MaterialDesignIcons.h) was generated with juliettef/IconFontCppHeaders.
Commercial middleware
These packages are integrated behind preprocessor switches but are not distributed with the engine — you need your own license to enable them.
If you use the SmartCommandLineArguments plugin for VS then there are supplied saved arguments to help you start the engine.
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