Zentera
Overview
Zentera is a voxel-based puzzle platformer where you control Gori, a lizard who uses his tongue to push, pull, and swing through miniature dioramic worlds. Built in Kudzu, a custom C++/Vulkan voxel engine, by a team of 16 at Breda University of Applied Sciences. The game shipped with 3 early access builds and a final release on itch.io, including full engine source code.
What I Did
My role was Engine & Tools Programmer, focused on building developer tooling and platform support for the team.
Engine Console
Built a full debug console for the engine using ImGui. The system captures all stdout/stderr output via C-level stream redirection and presents it in a searchable, filterable UI with color-coded warning levels. Used by the entire team across all disciplines – artists, designers, and programmers – and served as the only debugging tool when running release builds.
Hot Reloading System
Implemented real-time asset hot reloading so artists could edit voxel models in MagicaVoxel and see changes instantly in-engine without restarting. The initial implementation had serious performance issues at 7.28ms per frame, which I optimized down to 0.012ms per frame – a 910x improvement – by redesigning the file monitoring architecture.
PlayStation 5 Support
Due to NDA restrictions, implementation details for PS5 work are limited.
Fixed the AngelScript scripting engine for PS5’s stricter calling conventions and built a multithreaded packaging pipeline so the engine stays responsive during PS5 builds, with real-time progress displayed in the editor toolbar.