Sjoerd de Jong, former Senior Director at Epic Games and one of the most renowned Unreal Engine specialists, revealed what he has been doing since leaving the company. As it turned out, the developer is working on his own game engine called Immens Engine, which is intended to be an alternative to Unreal Engine and Unity.
De Jong announced his departure from Epic Games after 12 years of service back in June. At the time, he stated that the gaming industry was at a "turning point" and noted his intention to explore new approaches to game development. Now, in an interview with This Week in Videogames, he has revealed details about his new project.
Immens Engine is being developed by a small team, which also includes former Epic Games Technical Director Arjan Brussee. According to de Jong, current market leaders – Unreal Engine and Unity – have become too complex and feature-laden over time, which, in his opinion, has led to a certain stagnation in game engine development. He noted that new competitors, such as Godot, have only recently begun to emerge.
The developer explained that instead of constantly adding new features to an already overgrown toolkit, the team decided to create a modern engine "from scratch." Immens Engine is designed to allow studios to create more flexible and specialized tools, and will be inherently designed for integration with external services, libraries, and development tools.
Special attention in the new engine is given to supporting agentic artificial intelligence (agentic AI). However, de Jong emphasizes that Immens is not an "AI engine," but a full-fledged game engine whose architecture is simply inherently adapted to work with modern AI tools.
According to the developer, existing game engines, which have been created for decades for human interaction, are not very well suited for interacting with agentic AI systems. Interestingly, shortly before his departure, Epic Games also announced plans to actively develop Unreal Engine in the direction of integrating large language models and generative AI, including tools like Claude and Codex.
Despite the focus on AI, de Jong is confident that technology should not replace developers. He noted that the team's goal is not to allow users to "press one button and generate a game," but to provide a convenient platform that will help create high-quality projects using modern tools.