UEFN RTS 👾, 100k AI 🤖, Unreal Chaos Mover 🎮
Indie & Solo Dev Deep Dives 🎮
Solo Dev Netcode: Building the Voxel FPS Ace Squared
Ace Squared is a voxel-based multiplayer arena FPS inspired by Ace of Spades, featuring classes, fully modifiable environments, and modding support. In this interview, solo developer Oldground Software dives into the toughest part of development: writing scalable netcode entirely from scratch. They share concrete debugging tactics—heavy logging, video-plus-frame analysis, and process of elimination—that helped them fix every serious bug. The piece closes on the game’s recent shift to a free-to-play classic mode on Steam to grow its player base.
How One Dev Runs 100,000 AI at 10ms Per Frame
A solo developer shares how they pushed an interactive crowd sim from struggling at 10,000 agents to a smooth 100,000 AI with a ~10ms game thread. The secret sauce is heavy multithreading, parallelization, data-oriented design, and smart partitioning to keep data cache-friendly. Even health bars are optimized, using instanced mesh quads and WPO billboarding instead of widgets. The project still has room to grow with GPU computing and better acceleration structures on the horizon.
AI, GPUs & Smarter Game Balancing 🤖
From 12-Minute Frames to 45 Seconds: NVIDIA Artists on AI and GPUs
Two NVIDIA employees share how they broke into the company and how AI and GPUs are transforming 3D production. Ashlee Martino-Tarr now focuses on pushing cutting-edge generative AI—like multi-modal models, agents, and differential diffusion—into real workflows, enabling relighting and richer control over outputs. Sabour Amirazodi recalls slashing VR render times from 12 minutes to under a minute by building a small GPU render farm. They see AI increasingly tackling tedious 3D tasks like tiling, UVs, and skin weighting.
Supercell’s Secret Weapon for Game Balance: Reinforcement-Learning Bots
Supercell is leaning on reinforcement-learning bots to balance its dungeon-crawling title Mo.co before full global launch. Thousands of bots play with no predefined rules, learning which actions win and naturally gravitating to overpowered items and exploits. Developers then adjust gear and systems, retraining models every week or two as new ideas land. Used only as internal testers—not live opponents—these AI bots let Supercell stress-test player experience at scale long before real players hit the servers.
Production, Costs & Live Ops in Games đź’Ľ
$1M Trailers and $700 Seats: The Real Cost of The Game Awards
The Game Awards may be gaming’s biggest spotlight, but developers are paying a steep price to stand in it. Anonymous sources say a three-minute trailer slot now costs over $1 million—more than double last year’s rate. Even nominees only receive two free tickets, forcing additional team members to buy $300–$700 seats from the general pool, often without premium access. The article questions whether this prestige platform is still worth it for most studios.
Automating Unreal Dev Ops with Horde, UGS, and Gauntlet
Learn how Epic’s internal CI/CD system, Horde, can become your studio’s dev ops backbone. This talk breaks down Horde’s JSON-driven configuration, Perforce integration, and BuildGraph-powered jobs, then layers on pre-flight submit checks, UGS metadata and precompiled binaries, mobile device automation, and telemetry dashboards. You’ll also see how to deploy Horde via Docker, secure it, and script it with its HTTP API. A dense, hands-on starting point for studios wanting Unreal-native automation.
Unreal & UEFN Technical Experiments 🛠️
Chaos Mover: Physics-Based Multiplayer Characters in Unreal Engine
Unreal’s physics team presents Chaos Mover, a new plugin that replaces kinematic capsules with truly simulated characters that can push, be pushed, ride springy platforms, and react credibly to the world. Built on the Mover framework, it uses a custom constraint with force and torque limits so physics, not hand-coded queries, resolves movement edge cases. The session also unpacks Network Physics: fixed-step async simulation, frame-offset syncing, and client-side rewind/resimulation with input decay to hide corrections. Ideal for devs targeting responsive physics-heavy multiplayer.
Can You Build a Classic RTS in Fortnite? UEFN Put to the Test
Epic Games’ Florian Dirmhirn and Samuel Bass take on a wild challenge at Unreal Fest Stockholm: build a classic RTS inside Fortnite using UEFN. They walk through custom UI, camera, and control schemes, massive NPC hordes with unique behaviors, and bespoke gameplay systems—all wired up with Verse. Along the way, they share what worked, what broke, and what was just funny. It’s a deep dive into how far you can really push UEFN beyond shooter gameplay.