Voltron assembles from five lions. The Valkyrie in Macross folds from a fighter jet into a battle-ready mecha. The Autobots have been telling us for forty years that there’s “more than meets the eye.” Transformation is one of gaming and animation’s oldest tricks — take something familiar, and reveal it was always capable of becoming something bigger.
That’s also, more or less, the plot of Caravellius.
The ship that started it all
Back in 2021, I set out to build a shoot-’em-up called Caravellius — the Caravela, an old-world sailing ship, transforms into a spaceship to defend Earth from a Venusian invasion. Here’s the first footage of it taking shape:
Caravellius — early build
I made one deliberate, slightly stubborn decision going in: I wasn’t going to reach for an existing engine. I wanted to actually understand how games get built — cameras, collision, sprites, tile maps, all of it — by writing the plumbing myself.
Two candidates stood out for the actual graphics primitives: raylib and SDL. Rather than pick one and hard-wire the whole game to it, I built a boundary between “my game logic” and “whatever draws the pixels” from day one. If I ever wanted to swap the backend later, I shouldn’t have to rewrite the game to do it.
That boundary is what eventually became sunlight.
The engine transforms
About three months in, sunlight had grown enough of its own identity — map rendering, collision, sprites, sound, a scripting layer — that it stopped feeling like “part of Caravellius” and started feeling like its own thing. So I split it out into its own repository.
That’s the Voltron moment, if you squint: the pieces that had been quietly doing their job inside Caravellius assembled into something that could stand on its own.
Here’s a later look at Caravellius, running on top of that separated engine, with updated art and music:
Caravellius — updated build
Since the split, sunlight has kept leveling up on its own track — a real CI pipeline building it on Linux, macOS, and Windows on every change; a proper unit test suite; five sample projects showing off map rendering, animated sprites, collision, gamepad input, and a scripted “stage intro” cutscene; generated API docs; and, as of this week, its first tagged release, v0.1.0 — with prebuilt packages for all three platforms attached automatically the moment the tag goes up.
The next form
Here’s where the transformation keeps going. sunlight isn’t just Caravellius’s engine anymore — it’s now the rendering backend for Scarab, a new game engine I’m building that adds Lua scripting on top. Where sunlight handles the “how do pixels get on screen and what happens when two things collide,” Scarab is meant to let game logic live in Lua instead of C++.
It’s the same shape as the Caravela becoming a spaceship: the thing underneath didn’t get thrown away when it transformed. It got carried forward into something that could do more.
sunlight is open source under the zlib license — the repo, docs, and the v0.1.0 release are all up on GitHub if you want to see how a ship-turned-spaceship’s engine turned out:
github.com/popolony2k/sunlight
More forms to come.
Enjoy
[]’s
PopolonY2k
