Why This Exists
Snow Leopard Engine was the group project (COMP5530M, 2023/24) of the High-Performance Graphics and Games Engineering MSc programme at the University of Leeds: build a game engine from scratch, then prove it by shipping a game demo on top of it — the demo you can see in the video above.
The Team
| Name | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Kexuan Zhang | Leader. Architecture, Core Systems, Rendering, Editor, Audio, Report |
| Ziyu Min | Associate Leader. Rendering, Shaders, Report |
| Jubiao Lin | Physics, In-Game GUI, Poster |
| Simiao Wang | Physics, Poster, Showcase Video |
| Ruofan He | Gameplay (pathfinding) |
| Haodong Lin | Animation |
| Yanni Ma | Editor |
What We Built
- Modern OpenGL 4.6 renderer with PBR and post-processing effects
- DzShader — a Unity-like, data-driven shader format. This was my first experiment with data-driven shading, an idea that later matured into vshadersystem.
- PhysX physics simulation, skeletal animation, simple in-game GUI, and an editor
- An attempted C# scripting integration (the .NET SDK was already in the build requirements) — we never finished the API bindings. Later native/Lua/C# scripting work is documented in the current libvultra development branch.
Retrospective
The biggest gain was the people: seven teammates, each with their own strengths. The biggest regret was time — coursework and exams competed hard for everyone’s hours, and as the leader I absorbed a lot of pressure holding the project together. We didn’t reach the polish I had hoped for, though what we shipped was still respectable.
Those regrets didn’t go to waste. The shortcomings of a monolithic, OpenGL-era engine — and the wish to do it properly — are exactly what seeded the Vultra Ecosystem.
License
MIT — see the repository.