I Wish I Added This to My Game Engine Sooner

When I first started building the Untold Engine, I was obsessed with adding new features.

Rendering systems, lighting, post-processing, you name it.

What I wasn't doing was measuring.

Looking back, one of the biggest mistakes I made was waiting too long to build instrumentation and profiling tools into the engine. As the project grew, performance slowly regressed, and I had very little visibility into where frame time was actually going.

In this video, I talk about why instrumentation became one of the most valuable systems in the engine, how profiling changed the way I approach rendering, and why I believe every engine developer should build diagnostic tools much earlier than they think.

Whether you're building a game engine, renderer, graphics application, or any large software project, learning how to measure your system can save you countless hours of guesswork.

If you're interested in rendering, engine development, and the lessons learned while building the Untold Engine, consider subscribing for future devlogs.

Untold Engine is a Swift + Metal renderer and engine focused on XR, streaming, and real-time rendering for Apple platforms.

Untold Engine: https://github.com/untoldengine/UntoldEngine

If you enjoy engine development, rendering architecture, XR rendering, or graphics programming, consider subscribing.

I Promised Myself I'd Never Build Another Asset Format

A few years ago, while working on the C++ version of the Untold Engine, I made a decision that came back to haunt me: I built my own asset format.

When I rewrote the engine in Swift, I promised myself I wouldn't make the same mistake again. Instead, I adopted industry-standard formats like USD and built the asset pipeline around them.

For a while, that worked great.

But once I started implementing asset streaming and testing larger scenes, I ran into a problem. Every streamed asset required parsing files, traversing scene hierarchies, creating runtime resources, and performing work that was becoming increasingly expensive at runtime.

In this video, I talk about why I eventually changed my mind, why USD wasn't the right solution for this particular problem, and why I ended up building a native runtime asset format for the Untold Engine after all.

This is the story of a decision I never wanted to make—and why it turned out to be the right one.

Untold Engine is a Swift + Metal renderer and engine focused on XR, streaming, and real-time rendering for Apple platforms.

Untold Engine: https://github.com/untoldengine/UntoldEngine

If you enjoy engine development, rendering architecture, XR rendering, or graphics programming, consider subscribing.

AI Is Making Engineers Obsolete - It’s Not What You Think

AI is getting very good at writing code. So what does that mean for software engineers?

After months of building the Untold Engine using Claude and ChatGPT, I realized AI isn't just a faster way to code — it's changing what engineering actually means. The developers who ignore this are going to fall behind. Fast.

In this video I break down why the value of writing code is collapsing, what AI still can't do, and how I use Claude as an intern — not a replacement — while building a game engine from scratch. If you're a software engineer trying to figure out where you fit in an AI-driven world, this one is for you.

Untold Engine is a Swift + Metal renderer and engine focused on XR, streaming, and real-time rendering for Apple platforms.

Untold Engine: https://github.com/untoldengine/UntoldEngine

I Had To Stop Thinking Like A Graphics Engineer

I spent years thinking that if the rendering was good enough, the engine would speak for itself.

Better visuals. Better performance. More advanced rendering features.

But eventually I realized something uncomfortable: great rendering alone doesn’t make a great engine.

In this video, I talk about the mindset shift that changed how I approach the Untold Engine — from thinking purely like a graphics programmer to thinking about the full developer experience.

I share:

• Why rendering wasn’t enough anymore
• The hidden importance of tooling and user experience
• How friction prevents people from trying your engine
• Why I started simplifying workflows and lowering the barrier to entry
• The lessons I learned building systems around the renderer, not just inside it

This wasn’t a technical breakthrough. It was an engineering realization.

If you're building a game engine, renderer, toolchain, or any developer-facing software, this might save you from the same mistake I made.

Untold Engine is a Swift + Metal renderer and engine focused on XR, streaming, and real-time rendering for Apple platforms.

Untold Engine: https://github.com/untoldengine/UntoldEngine

If you enjoy engine development, rendering architecture, XR rendering, or graphics programming, consider subscribing.

The Debugging Systems I Built for My Game Engine

Building a game engine has completely changed the way I think about debugging software.

For a long time, my workflow was simple: Open the code editor, add breakpoints everywhere, inspect variables, and hope I could eventually find the root cause of the problem.

That worked when the engine was smaller.

But as the Untold Engine grew more complex — with rendering systems, tile streaming, texture mip streaming, and XR features — I realized I was debugging blind.

So I started building diagnostic and instrumentation systems directly into the engine.

In this video, I walk through:

• Engine performance instrumentation
• Render target debugging
• Tile streaming visualizers
• Texture mip streaming debuggers
• Rendering diagnostics for SSAO, SMAA, G-Buffers, and more
• How these tools changed my development workflow

I also talk about the biggest realization I’ve had as an engineer over the past few years:

Modern debugging is less about staring at code… and more about building tooling that gives you visibility into what your application is actually doing.

The Untold Engine is a Swift + Metal renderer and engine focused on XR, streaming, and real-time rendering for Apple platforms.

Untold Engine: https://github.com/untoldengine/UntoldEngine

If you enjoy engine development, rendering architecture, XR rendering, or graphics programming, consider subscribing.