Interview
April 23, 2026
Invincible VS™ brings its brutal brand of fighting to life using Unreal Engine 5
Quarter Up is the first in-house game development studio under Skybound Entertainment, headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Founded by the key members of the Double Helix Games’ Killer Instinct development team, the studio’s mission is to redefine the fighting game genre by being at the center of combat, presentation, and passion. With a team of over 40 veteran developers and industry talent, Quarter Up is dedicated to creating gameplay experiences that make every player feel heroic.
In the world of Invincible VS™, there is no room for compromise. Positioned as “the bloodiest fight in the universe”, the new game of the same name as its Invincible-inspired comics and show brings brutal, tournament-quality superhero combat to life with the goal of filling the 3v3 tag fighting game void that’s existed for a long time.
Developed by a core team of about 40 developers at Los Angeles-based Quarter Up, the game is bringing visceral combos, special abilities, and ultimate finishers to the forefront as players battle to the death as a team of fan-favorite characters in iconic locations.
Of course, creating a tournament-quality fighting game with high-profile IP attachment is no easy task and, to achieve its uncompromising goals for the project, the team at Quarter Up chose Unreal Engine 5.
What went into selecting the 3v3 fighting format and how has the relatively small team leaned into Unreal Engine 5’s rich feature set and established workflows to maintain its development momentum? Also, how is the team taking advantage of source code access and leveraging Unreal Engine’s built-in profiling tools to deliver the 60 fps action that’s crucial to the experience? We went toe to toe with Quarter Up’s Executive Producer Michael Willette and Technical Director Bill Merrill to find out.
Developed by a core team of about 40 developers at Los Angeles-based Quarter Up, the game is bringing visceral combos, special abilities, and ultimate finishers to the forefront as players battle to the death as a team of fan-favorite characters in iconic locations.
Of course, creating a tournament-quality fighting game with high-profile IP attachment is no easy task and, to achieve its uncompromising goals for the project, the team at Quarter Up chose Unreal Engine 5.
What went into selecting the 3v3 fighting format and how has the relatively small team leaned into Unreal Engine 5’s rich feature set and established workflows to maintain its development momentum? Also, how is the team taking advantage of source code access and leveraging Unreal Engine’s built-in profiling tools to deliver the 60 fps action that’s crucial to the experience? We went toe to toe with Quarter Up’s Executive Producer Michael Willette and Technical Director Bill Merrill to find out.
Thanks for joining us! Could you please start off by telling our community what Invincible VS™ is all about and how it correlates to the popular show and comics?
Michael Willette - Executive Producer: Invincible VS™ is a brutal, tournament-quality superhero 3v3 tag fighting game that lets players become a superhero in the bloodiest fight in the universe. The game is set inside the same universe as the comic and show, but it's a unique side story. Essentially, it’s a stand-alone special episode! Our goal is to be a natural evolution of media, going from comics to show to game. We’re an in-house studio, which allows us to work very closely with the comic and show teams.
What factors went into selecting the game’s 3v3 tag combat system?
Willette: There hadn’t been a 3v3 tag fighting game in a long time; we wanted to fill that void for the fighting game community, and we saw an incredible opportunity in the Invincible universe with its roster of characters and factions—like the Guardians of the Globe, Teen Team, and the Viltrumites.
We like the hype that comes with 3v3; characters have unique playstyles and move sets. Players mix and match those unique styles to best suit the way they want to play. We also enforce the idea of team and team synergy. Teammates help extend combos and break up your opponent’s attempts, but everything comes with some form of risk and reward. We want you paying attention during every interaction!
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
As a new studio making its debut title, how large is the core development team and what type of evaluation process goes into determining which engine to select?
Willette: We have a core team of around 40 developers and utilize co-dev partners to scale up as needed. This allows us to be extremely agile.
Our games must run at 60 fps—no matter what—with beautiful visuals. In selecting an engine, we wanted a mature codebase that was flexible to our needs and had a lot of familiarity with the team.
Why was Unreal Engine 5 chosen for this project and which UE5 feature(s) stood out to you most during development (and why)?
Bill Merrill, Technical Director: Unreal Engine 5 is feature-rich, enabling a relatively small team to waste no time in standing up core gameplay from day one. Technical teams are able to focus our limited resources on differentiating aspects of our technology. Another major aspect of UE that holds huge value for a team like ours is its broad platform support out of the gate.
From signature moves and visceral combos to special abilities and ultimate finishers, how has Unreal Engine 5 helped you iterate on and implement the game’s brutal superhero combat?
Merrill: UE’s content workflows are intuitive and comfortable to work in. Our animators and artists can pump content into the game confidently, allowing them to be creative and work quickly. The only way to deliver on this kind of gameplay is tons and tons of iteration.
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
How has Unreal Engine 5 helped you implement the real-time blood, bruises, and destructive environments that are featured as the action unfolds?
Merrill: Our tech art team is leveraging fairly traditional methods for dismemberment and gore, but doing so creatively. These workflows are quite mature in UE, so the programming team was able to map underlying technology to gameplay systems without major headaches. Our team focuses a lot of energy on rapid iteration, so being able to create our own interfaces to engine-level features such as physics and VFX has paid off. The engine’s flexibility and source code access have enabled us to do so. We have taken advantage of alternative animation techniques, such as Vertex Animation Textures (VATs) and procedural animation, building upon UE’s underlying features.
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
How have you leveraged Sequencer to design and deliver the game’s highly-cinematic presentation elements?
Merrill: Interestingly, while our cinematics efforts have leveraged Sequencer substantially, we don’t use it much for cinematic elements in gameplay like animated cameras, procedural camera effects, and multi-character interactions (such as grapples). This is mostly because of our unique network requirements (fully deterministic simulation and rollback-based networking). That said, we take UE’s mature workflows into account when designing our own camera and animation tools.
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
Can you please speak to the character animations in Invincible VS™ and how UE5’s built-in animation tools helped you make them feel both powerful and fluid? Also, what type of benefits did your team experience from this streamlined workflow?
Merrill: We heavily leverage montages and notify systems for managing gameplay animation, and precise timing of audio and visual effects associated with animation. The montage workflow has been comfortable for a variety of disciplines; programming, VFX, audio, tech art, and combat design.
Given that our simulation must be fully deterministic, and run in fixed ticks, we’ve built a library of utilities on top of base-level animation systems, allowing us to accurately and reliably sample animation data without a dependency on engine ticks or animation pose updates for rendering.
Our tech art and programming teams are applying rigid body simulation, Control Rigs, and custom animation graph nodes to implement procedural animation and secondary motion (cloth, hair, armor, accessories, etc) efficiently.
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
How have Unreal Engine 5’s lighting, materials, and environment tools helped you achieve an overall visual style that stays true to the source material?
Merrill: We’ve worked to strike a balance between dynamism in our lighting (to accommodate destruction) and performance, which is challenging given the competing goals of unyielding 60 hz gameplay and high-fidelity visuals, while targeting consoles and mid-level hardware. UE has maintained broad support for rendering features old and new, each with their own trade-offs, enabling us to find the techniques that suit our scenes, gameplay, and performance needs best.
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
Which UE5 feature(s) had the largest quantifiable impact on cross-discipline workflows? How did these features help the team reduce iteration time, improve team collaboration, and/or lower production costs throughout the development process?
Merrill: Niagara is an exceptional set of VFX tools and systems that have allowed a relatively small VFX team to outfit a tremendous amount of highly visual and superhero-grade combat. Our technical VFX artists are able to understand performance and scalability, while leveraging both CPU and GPU. VFX tools in most engine technologies struggle to elevate these elements in a way that VFX artists find intuitive.
Unreal’s core strengths lie in its broad feature set and excellent artist-facing tooling, so we’ve enjoyed the benefits of that strategy across so many areas of the game and its development.
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
How were you able to leverage C++ and Blueprints in tandem to streamline development across teams?
Merrill: Early on, we spent time developing a clear strategy around identifying which tools match the jobs.
All of our combat simulation runs in a combination of C++ and Lua (custom integration), since it was very important for us to be able to capture state across a huge breadth of systems, roll that state back, and resimulate it constantly.
Our (Lua) script integration enables our combat designers to work extremely quickly (instant iteration), in a text-based language with live debugging, without sacrificing determinism. Blueprint has been an immensely powerful tool for Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG) widgets as well as event-driven environmental changes in our arenas during live combat.
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
What was the team's approach to optimization and how did specific UE5 features help you achieve optimal performance?
Merrill: Performance is a constant battle. UE has helped us stay on top of performance through its built-in profiling tools (most notably Unreal Insights, Niagara, Gauntlet, and ProfileGPU).
Understanding how features of the engine scale and react to content choices can be difficult in any technology, so these tools are vital in helping us understand the engine’s nuances and how to balance fidelity with performance.
Epic has recently ramped up its production of first-party content and communications relating to performance, which reduces the amount of tribal knowledge that we need to run down ourselves. That can be very time-consuming, so all of Epic's efforts in the areas of optimization, scalability, and the dissemination of information are much appreciated!
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
How important has it been for you to have access to UE’s source code throughout development?
Merrill: Ultimately, Unreal wouldn’t be an option for us without source code access, so I can’t overstate the importance it has had for us, whether it’s been in adding or extending features, fixing bugs, or optimizing systems for our needs, source code access is essential. Even the ability to change a default value based on our common cases is pretty vital for keeping the team moving quickly and confidently.
Courtesy of Skybound Game Studios, Inc.
Did the team take advantage of the UE documentation, Epic Developer Community, Epic Pro Support or other parts of the ecosystem like Fab throughout development?
Merrill: We constantly consult documentation and articles published by Epic. We report issues on Epic Pro Support (EPS) so other developers can benefit from discoveries and fixes. Epic’s staff have provided us with valuable insight on many occasions.
Thanks for your time! Where can people go to learn more about Invincible VS™?
Willette: You can learn more about Invincible VS™ by visiting https://invinciblevs.com/ or follow us on your favorite social platform:
YouTube
TikTok
X
Discord
© 2026 Skybound Game Studios, Inc. Based on the comic book Invincible by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley. SKYBOUND™, SKYBOUND GAMES™, QUARTER UP™ and any related logos are registered or otherwise protected trademarks of Skybound, LLC. INVINCIBLE™, Invincible VS™™ and any related logos are registered or otherwise protected trademarks of Robert Kirkman, Inc. All rights reserved.