Overview

Shiver is a game engine I'm building in 2026. The goal is to have something working well enough to ship games with by 2027 — specifically small 3D games with fixed cameras: tower defences, factory games, generative story games.

I'm not building it because existing engines are bad. I'm building it because I've spent years working on other people's engines and I have a backlog of architectural ideas I want to try. This is the excuse.

This series documents those explorations. It's not a tutorial or reference documentation — it's written for game developers who are either building their own engines or curious about how these decisions get made in practice.

The main components

Shiver Engine — The runtime libraries. Ships with every game built with Shiver. The Shiver Engine Service also uses them to expose rendering and simulation to tools.

Shiver Editor — A tool for authoring and editing game content and integrating assets exported from other tools.

Shiver Engine Service (SES) — A co-process that hosts the engine runtime and exposes it to tools via IPC. No UI; it is spawned and managed by other tools.

Shiver Data Service (SDS) — Manages game content in versioned layers as a separate process from the Shiver Editor. Like SES, the SDS exposes an API via IPC, but does have a minimal UI in the system tray.

Documentation

Project Layout & Build System — Repository structure, library decomposition, and the build-from-source integration path.
IPC Architecture — How the editor, SES, and SDS communicate using ØMQ and FlatBuffers.

Source code access

I'm not yet ready to make Shiver open source. The project has moved Git repositories a few times and has undergone a complete re-write multiple times over the last year.

When Shiver stabilizes it will definitely be free for non-commercial use and maybe for commercial use as well.

All articles on this website explaining the ideas and techniques going into Shiver are covered by the same license as this website (see the page footer).

Why “Shiver”?

The name came from my friend Lucy. A 'Shiver' is one of the names for a group of sharks and there's a shark plushie that is beloved in the Trans community that's the current mascot of the Shiver engine. 🦈🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵🦈

Robots can go to hell.