// the find
TheCherno/Hazel
Hazel Engine
Hazel is a game engine built live on YouTube by The Cherno (Yan Chernitski), explicitly designed as a teaching tool rather than a production engine. The public repo intentionally lags behind a private `Hazel-dev` branch that Patreon supporters can access. Target audience is developers learning engine architecture from scratch, not anyone trying to ship a game.
The architecture follows standard engine patterns cleanly — layer stack, event system, EF-style entity-component with entt, renderer abstraction over OpenGL with Vulkan groundwork. The C# scripting layer via Mono is surprisingly complete for an educational project: internal calls, entity/component bindings, and a separate ScriptCore assembly. The 2D renderer uses batching with a proper quad/circle/line breakdown and MSDF font rendering — not toy-level work. Build system is Premake5 throughout, which is a reasonable choice and consistently applied.
Last push was April 2024 and the README still references 'end of 2020' goals, so the public repo is effectively in maintenance mode — the real development happens behind a Patreon paywall. Windows-only despite the README promising Mac/Linux/Android/iOS support; the Platform layer has a single Windows/ directory and nothing else. 3D rendering is minimal — there's an EditorCamera and a few scene files but no PBR pipeline in the public repo despite that being listed as a main goal. The Mono scripting runtime is vendored as pre-built static libs, meaning you can't update it or target a different runtime without significant work.