LODZEROengine

Game engine & editor

Make games that look great and run smooth.

LODZERO is a small, fast engine made for artists and programmers alike. Model, texture, light, script and play in one place, then ship your game to Steam.

Request early access See what it does
  • ~300 MB download
  • C# from top to bottom
  • Vulkan
  • Ships to Steam

Sumo Cars, running on LODZERO

Why LODZERO

A love letter to making games.

We built LODZERO to make the games we always wanted to make, the way we always wanted to make them. That meant leaving a lot of baggage behind.

  • Blurry, smeary frames
  • Installs measured in gigabytes
  • Coffee-break C++ compiles
  • Five apps to make one asset
  • Multiplayer bugs nobody can reproduce

Everything is here. Fast, small and fun.

Small

The whole editor is a download of about 300 MB. It installs in moments, opens fast and stays out of your way.

Fast

Sharp, steady frames in the game and in the editor. Change code, a mesh or a light and see it straight away, no waiting.

Made for artists

Every tool is visual, immediate and undoable, so you can try ideas without fear. Model, texture, light and play without ever leaving the editor.

Highlights

The good stuff, in motion.

Editor

Hit Play. You're in the game.

Play runs your real game right inside the editor, menus, HUD and all. Stop, tweak a value or a mesh, and you're back in. Code changes land in the running editor almost instantly.

  • Play in the viewport or its own window
  • Hot reload for your game code
  • Undo for every edit

Multiplayer

Online multiplayer, built right in.

Mark a value to sync it and a method to call it across the network, and you're online. Go server-authoritative so results are consistent and cheat-resistant, or client-authoritative so each player simulates their own objects. Either way, every player's own actions feel instant. Test a whole match with several players inside the editor.

  • Server- or client-authoritative
  • Prediction and rollback
  • Lag compensation
  • Rejoin and host migration
  • Steam lobbies, invites and relay

Replays

Every knockout gets its replay.

Instant replays and killcams are part of the engine. Show the last few seconds from any camera, slow it down, cut back to the action. They're light enough to leave on all the time.

  • Instant replays and killcams
  • Any camera, any moment
  • Works in online matches

Time travel

Rewind any play session. Then take over.

Every time you press Play, the session is recorded. Scrub back to the moment something went wrong, step through it frame by frame, and grab the controls from right there. Bugs that happen once can be watched again and again.

  • Seek, step and take over
  • Every session recorded automatically
  • Shows exactly where a run went differently

Modelling

A modelling suite, right in the level.

Block out and finish geometry where it lives, with the tools you reach for every day. Collision follows the mesh as you work: cut a hole and players can fall through it.

  • Extrude, bevel, inset, bridge, loops and cuts
  • Booleans, mirror and soft selection
  • UV tools and automatic unwrapping
  • Curves and swept pipes

Hotspotting

Trim sheets that apply themselves.

Model a shape and its faces find the right part of a hotspot sheet on their own: trims, panels and bevels land where they belong, at a consistent texel density. Level art that looks finished while you're still blocking it out.

  • Hotspot, strip and pipe mapping
  • Consistent texel density
  • Hotspot sheets made in texture graphs

AI modelling Experimental

Ask for a bar stool. Get a bar stool.

Describe a model and an AI agent builds it with the editor's own modelling tools: it blocks it out, checks its renders and refines. The result is ordinary, editable geometry, and it can change models you made too.

  • Uses the same tools you do
  • Plain, editable meshes
  • Edits the selected model on request

Texture graphs Preview

Procedural materials, node by node.

A full node-based texture generator inside the editor: noises, patterns, filters, blends and PBR outputs, with a live 3D preview. Graphs can texture a mesh from its own shape, and textures stay linked to the graph that made them.

  • Hundreds of nodes
  • Hotspot sheets for trims and panels
  • Rounded edges and panels baked from the mesh
  • Imports Substance Designer graphs

Realtime GI Preview

Light that bounces in real time.

Move the sun, a lamp or a wall and the bounce light follows at once, with no bake. Ray-traced probes fill the world and a per-pixel final gather keeps corners and contact shading crisp.

  • Hardware ray-traced probes
  • Per-pixel final gather
  • Dynamic sun, lights and geometry

Live lighting

Baked lighting with no Bake button.

Prefer baked? Move a wall and the lightmaps rebake in the background while you keep working. The GPU baker uses hardware ray tracing and denoising, with reflection probes that fit their rooms.

  • Background rebakes while you edit
  • Hardware ray-traced bakes
  • Directional lightmaps and light probes

Game UI

Game UI you can scrub like a timeline.

Author HUDs and menus as widgets, then preview every state and animation without starting the game. The code that connects them to your game is generated for you.

  • Visual widget authoring
  • Live preview with sample data
  • Localization built in

Made with LODZERO

Games ship on it. That's how it gets good.

PocoDoro

A tiny pet that lives on your desktop. Care for it while you work, and it grows into its own little character.

Wishlist on Steam →

Everything else

The rest of the toolbox.

Rendering

  • Forward or deferred, MSAA or TAA
  • Ambient occlusion, reflections, depth of field, motion blur
  • Soft sun shadows and many shadowed lights
  • Area lights, height fog, cloud layers, 3D skyboxes
  • Projected decals, skid marks and water ripples
  • HLSL surface shaders

Effects

  • GPU particles with curves, flipbooks and ribbons
  • Soft and lit particles, emitter lights
  • Ropes, cables and dynamic lines
  • Glass, jelly and liquid materials

Physics

  • Rigid bodies, joints and characters
  • Vehicles, from sim to arcade
  • Navigation meshes and agents
  • Squishy elastic solids Experimental

Animation

  • Skeletal animation from glTF
  • Animation graphs and state machines
  • Motion matching
  • Skeleton editing and pose mode

C# all the way

  • Engine, editor and gameplay in one language
  • Fast compiles, no C++ toolchain
  • Determinism checks for networked code
  • Visual scripting that turns into C#

Ship it

  • One-click packaging with content streaming
  • Native, ahead-of-time compiled builds
  • Steam uploads from the editor
  • Installer and a build-your-first-game tutorial

Want to build something on it?

LODZERO is in early access on Windows. Tell us what you're making and we'll get you set up. Studios, publishers and press are welcome too.

contact@lodzero.com Follow on X