Custom Engine - Coral Engine

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About Coral

I worked on this custom engine as a C++ and DX12 graphics programmer for 4 months. Some features I implemented are:

•  Instancing

•  Lighting optimizations

•  Directional shadows

•  PBR

•  Post processing passes 

•  UI

 The GitHub repo can be found here.

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Rendering a frame in Coral Engine

• I presented this project in the Graphics Programming Conference in 2024.

• During this talk I explained what goes into rendering a frame using Coral Engine's renderer, as well as shortly explained some of the optimization techniques we used.​

• The video can be found here.  Coral Engine presentation starts at 25:47

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Lichgate - a game created with Coral Engine

• Developed a top-down action game over the last 2 months using our custom engine.

• Added post-processing features like outlines, LUTs, and SSAO to match the game's style.

• Implemented an orthographic camera alongside the existing perspective camera.

• Game is available to play for free on Itch.io!

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Lighting optimizations (Clustered shading)

Visualized clusters

• Challenge: Needed to render tens of thousands of dynamic point lights efficiently.

• Solution: Implemented light clustering to manage performance.

• Approach:

  • Compute shaders divide the camera frustum into 3D clusters.

  • A depth pre-pass is used to cull inactive (empty) clusters.

  • Compute shaders then assign relevant point lights to each active cluster

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Shading passes

• Problem: VFX particles required transparency, which our existing opaque-only pass couldn't handle.

• Solution: Added a dedicated transparent pass alongside the opaque pass.

• Shading passes now include:

  • Physically Based Rendering (PBR)

  • PCF shadows from a single directional light

  • Fog calculations

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Post processing

Implemented post-processing effects:

• HDR

• Exposure tweaking

• LUTs

• Outlines

• Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion