The former “lead evangelist” of Unreal Engine now intends to compete with his previous employer. This is a positive development because Godot may no longer remain the only major “third option.”

In June, Sjoerd De Jong, an Unreal Engine modder and level designer who later became a full-time Epic Games specialist, announced that he was leaving the company after 12 years, during which he worked as a senior director and the “lead evangelist” of Unreal Engine. In his cryptic farewell message, De Jong stated that the gaming industry had reached a turning point and that his goal was to determine how developers could adapt to the changing demands of game development and meet them more effectively. We now have a clearer picture of De Jong’s plans for shaping the future of the industry. In an interview with This Week in Videogames, he revealed that he is developing his own game engine.

De Jong’s emerging competitor to existing engines is called the Immens Engine, and he is developing it with a small group of co-founders that includes former Epic technical director Arjan Brussee. De Jong intends the Immens Engine to offer an alternative to the dominance of Unreal Engine and Unity. He believes their market influence has contributed to stagnation in game development, while challengers such as Godot have only recently begun to emerge. According to De Jong, Unreal Engine and Unity are becoming increasingly large and accumulating more unnecessary baggage over time. This raises the question of whether there is room for a solution that would allow developers to build a completely clean and modern engine from scratch.

De Jong explained that instead of continuing to add new features to an increasingly bulky toolset, he hopes the Immens Engine will allow developers to create their own more personalized collections of tools. The system is being designed from the beginning to support the external tools, services, and libraries on which developers rely. De Jong says agentic AI is one of the external technologies that the Immens Engine will support, and he acknowledges that it is a highly topical subject. Shortly before De Jong left Epic, the company revealed its plans for the future of Unreal Engine, with large language models, generative AI systems, and tools such as Claude and Codex set to play central roles. De Jong remains skeptical about whether existing engines and development tools, which were created for humans over many years, can genuinely accommodate agentic AI.

Although the Immens Engine is being developed to provide a more flexible platform for agentic artificial intelligence, De Jong says it is not an “AI engine.” It is a conventional game engine that happens to be friendly toward AI-based architectures. Developers will still have to perform the work themselves, because De Jong does not want users to generate a game at the press of a button and release it alongside five million other titles created in exactly the same way.

Source: PCGamer, This Week in Videogames