The Ares Engine
A free and open source game engine for the indie space.
The Ares Engine
A free and open source game engine for the indie space.
Load fast... run fast... play fast... with less weight.
Ares is designed to present a minimal footprint for your game to load and run with. Less weight means less memory needs, less time to launch your game, and less disk space requirements. It can also lead to optimal memory use for assets, both in the CPU and the GPU.
Use the engine that is easy to understand.
Ares' design lays out scene data for optimal access, but not at the expense of easy comprehension. Documents explain how the scene data is stored in both the CPU and the GPU, and how systems process them at various stages of the game loop. Compute shaders are used to leverage the massive parallel processing of modern GPUs, but not in hidden or intimidating ways. Both game developers and game engine developers will find the engine easy to work with below the hood.
Build the fun factor and play out your campaign with a shooter first engine.
Ares is designed exclusively for developing first person shooter games. And while the design itself is tuned specifically for performing at scale for 3D shooters in open worlds, you are certainly free to build an off label genre game of your choosing with Ares.
Games should look and feel like games, not simulators.
If you want to render photo realistic images, Ares is not the engine for you. Ares is a game engine, built from the ground up with the philosophy that games should look, feel, and play like games, not simulators. Ares offers a minimal rendering framework with one common unlit shader for all 3D assets and support for a subset of PBR materials. This minimizing of rendering options both simplifies the framework and optimizes performance.
Limited platform support.
If you want to build a game for a mobile device, Ares is not the engine for you. Ares' code base is kept small, focused, and clean by the decision to target only PC platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) and an architecture that should readily lend to studios to extend support to console platforms (Xbox, Play Station, Switch) under their NDAs with the consoles' manufacturers.
Mobile device support does not clutter the code base, as it contributes nothing to the vision of its creator's dream to build a 3D shooter.
Use the engine designed specifically for use by its creator.
Ares is not "yet another 3D game engine". Ares is the answer to its creator's dream to build a performant, light weight, open world 3D shooter trilogy. All requirements for the engine are laid down specifically to make those games a reality.
About Ares
Ares is still in the womb, as they say. What has been developed thus far is the rendering framework prototype that demonstrates strong performance at scale. This first step was critical, as it validates architectural decisions and resolves the only unknown in the equation. Nothing remains left unresolved that can stop Ares from becoming a reality.
With this one piece in place, the realization of Ares has become a trivial, tedious project. That is to say, there are plenty of development tasks remaining, but none are hard problems.
Interested in Contributing?
The hope is to spin up a github repository for the Ares code base and make it available for the community to access and contribute by 2025Q3. At this time, the architecture is still having its foundation laid. But if you are interested in the Ares Initiative, please check back in the coming weeks for updates.
© 2025-present by Greg Ofiesh