Hellbound is a game created in a cross-platform (Windows / PS5) engine “Perry”, which I worked on throughout the entirety of my second year at university.

The first semester involved working on the engine from the ground up in a small group of programmers, with the goal of using that engine in the second semester to create a game in a larger group consisting of programmers, visual artists and designers.

At first, we started with a group of 5 programmers (with an additional 2 joining for the second half of the semester). I was one of the two graphics programmers and focused on the PS5 side. Together with my teammate who focused on Windows (using DirectX 12), we worked on a cross-platform rendering architecture while communicating with the rest of the team to ensure a logical and maintainable engine structure.

At the end of the first semester we had simple Blinn-Phong shading, however, the engine could handle massive amounts of draw calls (50k+ draw calls with 60+ FPS on a 2070 RTX). We also had 2D collisions, level loading through LDtk, particle systems and used FMOD for audio as well as the EnTT library for an ECS system. All these features worked both on Windows and PS5.

Below is the result of what our engine could produce at the end of the first semester:

In the second semester, our engine was given the green light to be used for a larger-scale project. Our group consisted of 17 people (8 programmers, 4 designers, 5 visual artists), and we went through the entire process of concepting, production and releasing, while working in an Agile environment. The game can be found on itch.io.

I continued working on and improving the rendering pipeline (mainly on the PS5 side). For example, I implemented a PBR pipeline into our engine. I also reworked the model loading to support levels created in Houdini by our technical artist and worked on implementing the functionality of UI.

I’m proud to have been part of this project throughout the whole school year and seeing the final result created in an engine which I worked on from the start. Our university teachers told us it was the best custom-tech project in recent years, and one of the best in our university’s history.

Check out the trailer below: