What is zigote?

Zigote is a game engine and application framework, a set of tools programmers use to build games and interactive apps, combining code written in C# and F# with a separate high performance layer written in a language called Zig. The idea is to split the work: the part that talks directly to the graphics card, handles windows, physics, and audio lives in Zig for speed, while everything a game developer actually writes day to day, like the user interface, scenes, and gameplay logic, lives in C# or F# in this repository. The rendering side supports modern visual effects such as shadows, ambient occlusion, screen space reflections, bloom, and anti-aliasing, built on a graphics technology called wgpu that can run on macOS, Windows, and Linux using each platform's native graphics driver. On top of that sits a user interface toolkit inspired by Flutter, a popular app building framework, which lets developers build interfaces that update automatically when the underlying data changes. For actually making a game, Zigote includes a system for organizing game objects and their behavior, called an entity component system, along with physics for both 2D and 3D, a save and load system, and the ability to change code while the game is running without restarting it. There is also a visual editor with a scene browser, an inspector panel, an asset browser, and a node based system for building shaders and visual effects without writing code by hand. Finished games can be packaged and run as standalone programs. To try it, you need the .NET 10 software development kit, the Zig 0.16 compiler, and git installed. After cloning the repository along with its native engine submodule, running one build command compiles both the Zig and C# parts together, and separate commands let you launch the visual editor or example galleries showing off the interface toolkit. Zigote is released under the MIT license, though some bundled fonts and native libraries keep their own separate licenses.