Songs Of Glimmerwick Engine — The Projected 2D Pipeline Explained

The exact Songs of Glimmerwick engine is not documented — Eastshade Studios has never publicly named it as Unity, Unreal or anything else. What is documented, in unusual detail, is how the game is technically built: technical director Danny Weinbaum wrote a Game Developer deep dive describing it as 2D art running inside a 3D engine, using a "projected 2D" workflow that makes the whole game look like one continuous hand-drawn illustration while behaving like a 3D world.

What Is Known About How Songs of Glimmerwick Is Built

The deep dive (written by the studio's founder and technical director, February 2023) breaks the world into layers, each built a different way:

World element	Technique used
Props, foliage, small objects	Hand-drawn illustrations mapped onto flat planes (quads), rotated to the camera angle
Terrain	A full 3D mesh with vertex splatting between textures — the same approach as Eastshade
Buildings and larger objects	Illustrations "projected" onto low-poly 3D meshes from the camera's exact viewpoint
Small interiors	Same projection approach as buildings
Large interiors (like the library)	Mixed: illustration plus real 3D geometry with tiling textures
Birds and moving objects	Both 2D sprites and fully 3D models, depending on the effect needed

The camera looks down at a fixed 30-degree angle, the sun casts real-time shadows onto the drawn elements, and the terrain shader program was carried over directly from the one Weinbaum wrote for Eastshade, the studio's 2019 first-person painting game.

Is It Unity or Unreal?

There is no public answer. Neither the developer nor press coverage names the engine, and the deep dive deliberately talks about "a 3D engine" in generic terms — "it's all fairly normal 2D-in-a-3D engine stuff," as Weinbaum puts it. If knowing the specific engine matters to you (for modding expectations, for instance), the honest state of the record is: not documented yet. Any specific engine claim you see elsewhere is speculation unless Eastshade Studios states it.

The documented-vs-undocumented boundary in one view:

Question	Documented answer	Source
Which engine (Unity, Unreal, custom)?	Not documented — no official statement	—
Rendering approach	2D art inside a 3D engine, projected workflows	Game Developer deep dive
Terrain	Full 3D mesh; terrain shader reused from Eastshade	Game Developer deep dive
Camera	Fixed 30-degree downward angle	Game Developer deep dive

Why the Pipeline Matters for How the Game Looks and Plays

The projected-2D approach is not just trivia — it produces the specific qualities players notice in screenshots and footage. The deep dive lists the concrete payoffs:

• Players and NPCs can walk around buildings with correct depth and collision, impossible with flat drawn backdrops.
• No building corners appear to "float" when you stand next to them.
• Real-time cast shadows meet building bases accurately.
• Subtle parallax adds depth, especially around rooftops.
• Elevation changes, mountains and terraces feel natural rather than "gamey," because the terrain is genuinely 3D.

The cost of this look was time: Weinbaum notes the mixed workflow took over a year of trial and error to settle on, and that the labor-intensive interiors were mitigated, in his words, by "spending way more money and production time." That investment is part of why the game took the better part of a decade to ship — and it is visible the moment the character runs into the water or the shore waves rise and fall against the hand-drawn beach.