Hazel Engine

Interactive 3D development platform

Hazel is a simple-yet-powerful 3D game engine made by Studio Cherno and volunteers, available for use now with big plans for the future.

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What and Why.

Hazel started back in 2018 as part of the Game Engine series on YouTube. Hazel is a 3D game engine that you can use right now to create and ship 3D games, interactive applications, artwork, etc. We created Hazel because we have a real passion for making game engines, and we want to create and ship commercial games using our own technology.

Some features and tech:

  • Written in C++ with support for Windows and Linux
  • C# .NET Core for scripting (like Unity)
  • Vulkan for rendering, with an API-agnostic renderer
  • Multi-threaded runtime (main thread + render thread)
  • Physically-based forward+ HDR renderer

Read more on the About page.

How do I get Hazel?

Hazel is currently available via Patreon to Supporter III level Patrons or higher, for a subscription of $10 USD per month - Patreon is the primary way we fund this project. Access remains as long as your membership is active, like a Netflix subscription.

As Hazel matures and grows, we would like to make its technology more freely available. We’re already doing this by open-sourcing certain systems so they can be used by the community for other projects, such as Coral, Hazel’s C# scripting engine.

Eventually our plan is to release Hazel for free, in the form of freely available pre-built binaries for all supported platforms. This means that anyone will be able to create and publish Hazel games and applications for free. Hazel’s source code and development branches will remain accessible through Patreon, which will enable us to continue to fund development.

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Future plans and direction.

We have some serious future plans.

Firstly, one of our primary motivations for developing Hazel is using it to create and release commercial games. That means we’re dedicated to ensuring that Hazel is a stable and well-made product capable of facilitating video game production end-to-end, from the very start of prototyping and pre-production to shipping and distribution.

We also see Hazel as a platform for art, education, and real-time applications. We regularly use it for math/data visualization, creating interactive applications, and with our currently-in-development path tracer we’ve also been exploring offline rendering and cinematic tools for both static and moving images.

We’ve also had the privilege to partner with some great companies in the industry, so we’re really excited for the future.

Latest Articles

Development articles and videos from the team.

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Plans for 2024

A look into some of the new features we'll be working on over the next year.

Tags: Meta
Yan Chernikov

Yan Chernikov

1 min read
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Continuous Integration and Automated Testing

We've finally got continuous integration for Windows and Linux, with automated testing planned for the near future.

Tags: Meta
Yan Chernikov

Yan Chernikov

4 min read
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Meet the Team

Meet the Hazel Core Team, and see what everyone works on.

Tags: Meta
Yan Chernikov

Yan Chernikov

1 min read

Get Access to Hazel

Support the development on Patreon for $10 USD per month, and you’ll instantly get access to Hazel’s entire development repository and its community.