Eonlore

Miko walks up to a forest shrine at night, between stone lanterns and lion-dog statues — The Shrine Glade at night. Everything here runs in Hydro: 3D meshes, upright pixel-art sprites, point lights, bloom, fog and fireflies as particles.

Overview

You play Miko, a shrine maiden, through a world of shrines, temples and lantern-lit streets. The world is built in 3D, but the people in it are hand-drawn pixel-art sprites standing in that world: they cast shadows, are lit by lanterns, and walk on real terrain.

Eonlore started as the test project inside the engine repository. In November 2026 it moved to its own repository, which builds against a pinned Hydro commit, like any game on any engine would. The story of that move is in the devlog.

Scenes

A temple gate with a green tiled roof and paper lanterns — The temple gate, with stone steps between retaining walls.

Miko and a monk climbing the steps to a temple hall — The main hall. Sprites stand in front of and behind 3D geometry.

A merchant street with red paper lanterns — A merchant street at dusk.

Villagers in front of shops on the merchant street — Villagers going about their day.

A courtyard with a twisted pine and two villagers talking — Tilt-shift depth of field keeps the eye on where Miko walks.

A courtyard with red maples, falling leaves and a monk sweeping — Falling maple leaves are particles, lit like the rest of the scene.

One scene, three lights

Each scene has its own lighting preset: sun, ambient light, fog, exposure, bloom and grading. They are stored as data, not code, so the same scene can be tuned or switched without a rebuild.

The Shrine Glade at dusk, with sunbeams through the trees — Dusk

The tonemap keeps the darks exactly as painted, so pixel art never drifts off its palette in the shade. Why that matters.

Battles

Turn order by speed, shown at the top of the screen, so you can plan ahead.
Elemental weaknesses, hidden until you discover them.
Shields and Break: hitting weaknesses wears an enemy's shield down; at zero it breaks and loses its next turn.
Momentum: save it up and spend it to boost an attack or skill.
Guard, items and running, with damage numbers coloured by weakness, resistance and healing.

The battle rules are plain functions over plain values, tested without a window or GPU. How the game code is structured.

Menus

The inventory menu: items with counts and a description panel — Inventory, with keyboard focus and item details.

The character menu: Miko level 1, stats and equipment slots — Character: level, stats and equipment.

Black glass panels with gold frames over the paused scene, built on Hydro's runtime UI: anchored layouts, bitmap fonts and keyboard navigation. Items, characters and quests come from data tables edited in the editor.

Art direction

Actors are drawn finer than the world, on purpose: 38.4 texels per metre, so characters read clearly against the scenery.
Saturation by importance: the party is the most saturated (Miko's red and white), villagers are muted earth tones, and the environment is the most muted.
Checked by scripts: a validator checks every sprite for binary alpha, sheet grids, pivots and a feet anchor within one pixel.

Under the hood

Every screenshot on this page uses engine features I've written about:

Pixel-art sprites in a 3D world: upright cards, cut-outs and depth
Shadows for cardboard characters
Walkable dioramas with Jolt
Scene hierarchy and runtime UI
Game content as data

Status

In development. Next up are the abilities and equipment menus, more battles and enemies, and fading out scenery that hides Miko. Follow along on GitHub or in the devlog.

All projects Next: the Hydro engine