Breno Aguirres
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
LOST RENEGADES
EST. OFF THE ROAD
A small independent studio building games — and the technology to run them — from the ground up.
Currently developing Project Viola, an action-adventure RPG of bandits, gaslight, and folk-spirits — on our own engine, the Shield Engine.
PROJECT 01
Project Viola
In development · wishlist coming soonA bandit's elegy, played in the key of N64.
Project Viola is a third-person action-adventure RPG that returns to the late-90s Nintendo 64 idiom — Z-targeting combat, dungeon-based exploration, tools that gate the world, a quiet hub world to walk between trials — and threads it through a setting almost no game has visited.
The world is a steampunk-dystopian Brazil. A seven-tier vertical megalopolis named Fumasa breathes gaslight and soot into a sky stained by furnaces. Below it, the red-dust sertão burns; further out lie river-jungles and salt flats where the encantados — the folk-spirits — are no longer rumor. Magic is real. So is the militia.
You play cangaceiros — bounty-hunting bandit-warriors of the backlands — riding between contracts in a country where the powerful trade in saints and silver. Progression is in tools, not statistics: each dungeon teaches one mechanic and trusts you to use it.
The conceit: the story is narrated from beyond death. Kirino, a cangaceiro composing his own legend in cordel verse, tells it as he remembers it — which is to say, not honestly. What you see and what he sings drift apart. It is a game about how a life becomes a song, and what gets lost in the singing. (Machado de Assis is on the shelf.)
DEMO SCENE
CONCEPT ART
LEVEL DESIGN SKETCH
An early dungeon layout — paper before pixels.
TECHNOLOGY
The Shield Engine
Built from scratch — because owning the stack is the work.
Lost Renegades is migrating Project Viola onto the Shield Engine — our fully custom, proprietary engine, written in C and C++ on top of Vulkan. There is no Unreal, no Unity, no third-party runtime beneath: just code we control, end to end.
An entity-component-system architecture sits at the core. Above it, a deliberately late-N64 graphics pipeline — a small family of Vulkan pipelines (opaque, alpha-blended transparent, additive, skybox, UI/HUD, wireframe debug) running Gouraud lighting, nearest-neighbor textures, and depth fog by design. Physics, audio, scene and resource management, skeletal animation, particle systems, a fixed-timestep main loop — every layer built in-house.
Two reasons we work this way. The look of Project Viola lives or dies on a renderer we can sculpt to the millimeter; and the studio's long-term independence depends on never paying rent on the tools we ship with.
UNDER THE HOOD
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C / C++ · VULKAN
A modern low-level core. No third-party runtime underneath the work.
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ENTITY COMPONENT SYSTEM
Composition over inheritance, all the way down. Designed for the game we are actually shipping.
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N64-STYLE PIPELINES
Opaque, transparent, additive, skybox, HUD, and wireframe debug — Gouraud-lit, nearest-neighbor sampled, depth-fogged on purpose.
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CUSTOM PHYSICS
Built from scratch so collision and motion can be shaped to fit Project Viola, not a generic middleware.
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CUSTOM AUDIO
In-house mixing and routing — the soundscape is part of the engine, not bolted on.
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FIXED-TIMESTEP LOOP
Deterministic simulation tick decoupled from render. Predictable, debuggable, reproducible.
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SCENE & RESOURCE MANAGER
Loading, lifetimes, and reference graphs handled by code we can read on a Sunday morning.
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SKELETAL ANIMATION
Bones, skinning, and blending wired through the ECS for clean composition with gameplay state.
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PARTICLES
GPU- and CPU-side emitters tuned for the painterly, low-resolution look Project Viola asks for.
ENGINE DEMO
THE STUDIO
Meet the Crew
A two-person workshop, by design.
Jarrid Kamphenkel
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
CORRESPONDENCE
Get in Touch
Press inquiries, partnerships, fellow renegades — write to us. We answer.
UNTIL THE NEXT CONTRACT