// games

Written in Zia.
Running on Zanna.

These are the programs that keep the platform honest. Every one is written in Zia, compiled by Zanna’s own compiler, and drawn by Zanna’s own renderer with no engine, no middleware and no graphics library underneath. When a feature lands in the runtime, one of these is what proves it works.

// five worth a look

The ones that stretch the engine

Each of these was built to force a different part of the stack into existence: a first-person shooter needs view models and point-light shadows, an open world needs streaming and time of day, a bowling sim needs physics you can feel. None of them is a benchmark. They are games, and they are how the engine got its features.

A bowling alley rendered in 3D: two lanes receding to a rack of pins, a scoreboard along the top, and power, curve and release meters in the lower left. — **3D Bowling** — gameplay frame captured through `Canvas3D.ScreenshotFinal()`.

3D · physics · post-processing

3D Bowling

Ten-pin bowling with a real physics ball: hook, oil pattern wear, pin deflection and lane friction. The one that made rigid-body contact behaviour and the post-processing chain earn their keep, because a bowling ball that does not curve convincingly is immediately obvious.

Rigid bodies, friction cones and swept collision
Tone mapping, bloom and colour grading over the frame
Lane oil simulated across a session, not faked per throw

zannademos/games/3dbowling · source

A first-person view across a dust-hazed plain: a bolt pistol held at the lower right, walking mech silhouettes ahead, an ammo and health HUD, and a wave objective banner across the top. — **Ashfall** — wave 1 of a mission, captured mid-encounter.

3D · first-person · scene-authored

Ashfall

A first-person mission campaign in a dust storm. Nine missions and a hub, and the reason the first-person runtime exists at all — view-model rendering, point-light shadows and height fog were built because this needed them.

Nine missions loaded from authored .scene3d files
Weapons, waves, objectives and salvage as typed scene data
A second build, ashfall-scenes, proves the scene path reproduces the code-built original exactly

zannademos/games/ashfall · source

A third-person view of a character standing at the edge of a lake, with wooded hills behind, a beacon objective banner at the top left, a minimap at the lower right and a stamina bar along the bottom. — **Ridgebound** — daytime, with the beacon objective active.

The same lakeside location at night, lit by moonlight, with the same HUD elements. — **The same place after dark** — one time-of-day system, not two sets of art.

3D · third-person · open world

Ridgebound

An open landscape you cross on foot looking for signal beacons. Terrain, water, foliage and a day-night cycle over an area large enough that streaming and culling stop being theoretical.

Spring-arm third-person camera with target lock
Procedural terrain and water built at runtime
Time of day driving sky, sun angle and fog together
Navmesh-driven agents over the real walkable surface

zannademos/games/ridgebound · source

2D · campaign · scene-authored

XenoScape

A ten-region 2D campaign with abilities, upgrades and a progression system. Its rebuild, xenoscape-scenes, moved every region out of level-builder code and into authored .scene2d files — every enemy, gem, key, health item and upgrade is an object in the file, so the game injects nothing after load.

Ten regions, each a single authored scene file
Tile collision, autotile rules and animations as scene data
A parity probe proves the scene build matches the code build

zannademos/games/xenoscape · source

The 3D Bowling title screen: the alley rendered behind a menu, with the game's name and menu entries composited over it. — **A menu drawn by the same renderer** — UI composites over the live 3D frame rather than through a separate 2D path.

3D · UI over 3D

Menus are not a special case

Zanna’s GUI widgets draw against either a 2D Canvas or a Canvas3D, so a game’s front end composites over the live rendered frame instead of switching to a separate UI stack. Screen fades, vignettes and HUD panels all take the same overlay path, and that path now composites identically on Metal, Direct3D 11, OpenGL and the software renderer.

zannademos/games/3dbowling · how the renderer does it →

// the rest

Everything else in the tree

Smaller, older, or deliberately simple. The arcade set exists because recreating a known game is an unforgiving test: everyone can tell when the ghosts move wrong. The ones marked BASIC are written in Zanna’s other language and run on exactly the same runtime.

3D · sport

3D Baseball

A ball field with a camera director that follows the play. Imported OBJ geometry, skeletal animation and a pitching model.

3D · sandbox

3D Scene

A scene-graph testbed: lights, materials, cameras and imported models with nothing else in the way.

3D · graphics

Graphics Show

A tour of the renderer’s features one at a time — the thing to run when you want to see what the backend can do.

2D · arcade

Centipede

Mushrooms, splitting segments, a spider that ruins your day. A sprite-and-collision stress test with a scoreboard.

2D · arcade

Frogger

Lane traffic, log rafts and a timer. Moving-platform carry behaviour in two dimensions.

2D · arcade

Crackman

A maze chase with four independent ghost personalities. The one that proves per-entity AI state stays correct over a long session.

2D · board

Chess

Full rules, legal-move generation and an AI that thinks on a background thread while the board stays responsive.

2D · BASIC

VTris

Falling blocks, written entirely in Zanna BASIC. Same runtime, same renderer, different front end.

2D · BASIC

Pac-Man (BASIC)

A maze chase in BASIC, kept alongside the Zia version so the two languages can be compared on the same problem.

2D · tool

Paint

A small painting program: brushes, layers and file export, built on the GUI toolkit rather than the game runtime.

The larger games live in github.com/zannagames/zannademos, a repository of their own, so cloning the compiler does not drag a games library along with it. The small ones stay in examples/ in the main repository, where they double as tutorials.

// not games

Things that are not games at all

The runtime is not a game library with a compiler attached — it is a general one. These exist to keep that true.

Web server

A threaded HTTP/1.1 server with a router, a worker pool, configurable logging and static file serving. Written in Zia against Zanna.Network, with no HTTP library underneath it.

ZannaSQL

A relational database: a SQL parser, a query planner and a storage engine, in Zia. The reason the collection types and the file layer are as strict as they are.

Telnet client

Protocol negotiation and terminal emulation over a raw socket. Small, old, and a good test of the network stack’s edges.

VARC

An archiver: compression, extraction and integrity checks over Zanna’s own compression and archive code.

// about these images

None of these are mockups

Every image on this page is a frame a real build actually produced. The game shots come from each game’s own capture probe, through Canvas3D.ScreenshotFinal() or Canvas.Screenshot() and out through Pixels.SavePng() — Zanna’s own PNG encoder writing a frame Zanna’s own renderer drew. The Studio shot comes from a production AppShell captured through Zanna.GUI.TestHarness.

Nothing here was taken with a screen grabber, retouched, upscaled, or composited. Where a caption needs to explain what you are looking at — as the XenoScape one does — it says so rather than letting the picture imply something it should not. They are regenerated by one script, and a game whose probe fails does not get a stale screenshot quietly left in its place: the run fails instead.

Some of these games look plain, and that is the honest state of things. They are built by a small team to prove engine features, not to sell themselves, and the art budget went into the parts that had to be tested.

Written in Zia.Running on Zanna.

The ones that stretch the engine

3D Bowling

Ashfall

Ridgebound

XenoScape

Menus are not a special case

Everything else in the tree

3D Baseball

3D Scene

Graphics Show

Centipede

Frogger

Crackman

Chess

VTris

Pac-Man (BASIC)

Paint

Things that are not games at all

Web server

ZannaSQL

Telnet client

VARC

None of these are mockups

Written in Zia.
Running on Zanna.