Spark Engine

The decision to write our own engine ("Spark") for Natural Selection 2 surprised us but we're positive we made the right decision. Our engine is designed to enable small teams to make immersive games. As a tiny team ourselves, having tools that let us iterate extremely quickly is an absolute must. Here are the goals we had in mind when building it:

  • Build a library of components that makes it easy and enjoyable to create 3D programs
  • Make code as fast as possible, but be willing to sacrifice 10% speed and memory efficiency to build clean and reusable interfaces
  • Keep dependencies between systems to a minimum to allow them to be used independently and in novel ways
  • Design code so that any piece could be posted on a website and be understandable
  • Allow content creators to work the way they want to work - don't impose a specific pipeline or workflow

Right now it runs on Windows but we also plan on fully supporting OS X, Linux and Xbox 360. Here are the juiciest blog updates and movies describing and showing this technology:

We're very excited about licensing our engine when it's ready. For more information, please sign-up on our mailing list (upper-right on this page) or e-mail us.