Build log · Unreal Engine 5

A small place worth standing in — by 31 December.

A stylised walkthrough world: a forest clearing, a creek with a small bridge, and a handful of buildings. No combat and no systems — it is built to be worth looking at and pleasant to walk through, and it is judged on six images and a short video.

It replaces an extraction shooter that was stopped deliberately, three weeks in, while it was working. That story is at the bottom of this page rather than hidden from it.

Week 1 starts 28 September

What done means

31 Dec 2026

Not “the world is finished” — a place is never finished, and that is how projects like this die. Done is five things that either exist or do not:

  1. 01

    Six hero shots, from fixed camera positions chosen in week 2.

  2. 02

    A 45-second flythrough.

  3. 03

    A packaged build you can walk around in — interactive, not a render.

  4. 04

    A photo mode: free camera, depth of field, a couple of filters.

  5. 05

    All of it published here, where you are reading this.

One scene, roughly 100 by 100 metres. No open world, no second location.

The rules that make it shippable

Order of operations decides everything

Anything that moves other things comes first: terrain moves trees, water carves terrain, the village footprint moves both. Grass moves nothing, so it is last. Plant before blocking out and half of it gets deleted.

One asset pack, one artist

Stylised work falls apart when packs are mixed — outline weight, colour and shape language never agree between artists. Coherence beats variety, and it is what makes this affordable solo.

The style comes from light, not shaders

Time of day, fog and a colour grade do the work. A hand-written cel shader in week four is the rabbit hole that eats the deadline.

Detail only where the camera looks

The six shots are chosen before any dressing starts. Work outside them is invisible by definition.

Ship it rough over ship it late

Kept from the last plan, because it is the rule that survived contact. A modest scene published on 31 December beats a better one still being lit in March.

Roadmap

13 weeks · to 31 Dec 2026

  1. Weeks 1–3 · Sep–Oct

    Phase 1 · Block it out

    Terrain sculpted grey — the clearing, the creek bed, the shelf the village sits on. Buildings and bridge as plain boxes. A rough lighting pass so the shapes can be judged, then the six camera positions get chosen and written down.

  2. Weeks 4–5 · Oct

    Phase 2 · Ground and water

    The creek, which carves the terrain as it goes and so has to arrive before anything is planted. Then the landscape material — grass, dirt, rock, and mud at the water's edge.

  3. Weeks 6–10 · Nov–Dec

    Phase 3 · Dress it

    Foliage biggest to smallest — trees for silhouette, then bushes, then grass to hide the seams. The blockout boxes become real buildings, props go where the shots look, and a detail pass softens every hard line where things meet the ground.

  4. Weeks 11–13 · Dec

    Phase 4 · Finish it

    The real lighting pass, which is where a stylised scene is won or lost. Then photo mode, the six captures, the flythrough, a packaged build, and publishing — with four days of buffer that are deliberately empty.

What happened to the shooter

Boxed 24 Sep 2026

For three weeks this page described a solo sci-fi extraction shooter, and it got further than the Unity project ever did. By the end of week three there was a 200-metre greybox sector with three routes from spawn to extraction, each walked and timed: 55.6s across the open middle, 77.1s through a covered warren, 75.4s the long way round. A working extraction loop — walk in, hold five seconds, get out. That week's goal was met four days early.

It was stopped anyway. The weeks ahead were enemy AI, weapon feel, loot tables and balancing — months of systems work, for a first shipped game, by someone whose interest is art, light and level design. Continuing meant choosing the least interesting version of the next fourteen weeks.

Nothing was thrown away. The sector, the loop and the notes are tagged in the repository at the point they stopped, and the workflow around them — the plan, the board, the session log — carried straight over to this project. Stopping something that works is a different act from abandoning something that does not, and only one of the two is worth repeating.

The shots

0 of 6

Six images and one flythrough, captured in week 12 from positions chosen in week 2. Nothing appears here before then — the scene spends nine weeks as grey shapes, bare terrain and half-planted trees, and none of that is worth showing.