// the find
TheCherno/Sparky
Cross-Platform High Performance 2D/3D game engine for people like me who like to write code.
Sparky is a C++ game engine started by TheCherno (Yan Chernikov) as a companion to his YouTube series on engine development. It's primarily a learning resource — the codebase documents the process of building a 2D/3D engine from scratch, not a production-ready tool you'd ship a game with.
The engine covers a real breadth for a tutorial project: it bundles Box2D for physics, FreeImage for texture loading, and builds a batch renderer with its own shader and buffer abstraction. The renderer architecture shows a proper understanding of minimizing draw calls. Following along with the video series while reading the code is a genuinely good way to understand how an engine's layers fit together.
Abandoned since 2020 — the last commit is over five years ago and the README still says 'will be updated eventually'. The build system is Visual Studio project files only, so the 'cross-platform' in the description is aspirational. TheCherno later started Hazel as its successor and documented that process instead, which means Sparky is a historical artifact, not something you'd fork and extend. FreeImage itself is also a problematic dependency — it has a long history of unpatched CVEs and most people have moved on from it.