Made with UE5, Wildgate blends emergent gameplay with explosive spaceship combat
As the first title from Dreamhaven developer Moonshot Games, Wildgate is bringing its unique blend of style and substance to spacefaring fans of team-based shooters. The game, which is developed using Unreal Engine 5, offers action-packed emergent gameplay alongside explosive spaceship combat on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
In Wildgate, players take on the roles of various Prospectors to form small crews as they venture into a hostile, unpredictable, and mysterious region of space in pursuit of an ancient relic known as the Artifact. Success requires cooperation and tactical mastery, with a whole lot of fun to be had along the way.
So, how does Wildgate truly stand out from other titles in the genre, and which UE5 features helped the team at Moonshot achieve its ambitious goals for its debut title? We caught up with Moonshot Technical Director Grant Mark and Technical Art Director Rick Gilliland to learn more about the out-of-this-world project.
In Wildgate, players take on the roles of various Prospectors to form small crews as they venture into a hostile, unpredictable, and mysterious region of space in pursuit of an ancient relic known as the Artifact. Success requires cooperation and tactical mastery, with a whole lot of fun to be had along the way.
So, how does Wildgate truly stand out from other titles in the genre, and which UE5 features helped the team at Moonshot achieve its ambitious goals for its debut title? We caught up with Moonshot Technical Director Grant Mark and Technical Art Director Rick Gilliland to learn more about the out-of-this-world project.
Thanks for joining us! Could you please tell us what Wildgate is all about?
Grant Mark, Technical Director: Thanks for having us! Of course. Wildgate is a PvP adventure game where players work together to crew a starship, explore alien ruins, find powerful artifacts and experimental technology, and battle other player crews in a universe of endless adventure.
Grant Mark, Technical Director: Thanks for having us! Of course. Wildgate is a PvP adventure game where players work together to crew a starship, explore alien ruins, find powerful artifacts and experimental technology, and battle other player crews in a universe of endless adventure.
What were your biggest influences when crafting Wildgate’s universe, both from a narrative and an aesthetic perspective?
Rick Gilliland, Technical Art Director: We wanted to find our own little unique corner of sci-fi. We were inspired by the great classics in that space like Star Wars and Star Trek. We also wanted to pull in the charm and fun of cultural touchstones like Saturday morning cartoons and Jim Henson’s various creations.
We wanted The Reach to feel wondrous and challenging all at once, so we looked at a lot of powerful natural phenomena like thunderstorms and huge waves. We wanted you to feel like you were in space, but not space like you’ve ever seen it, so that involved drawing from a lot of non-space reference images, like cloud tanks, esoteric animals, and microscope images.
For characters, we set out to create a range of characters that would let us tell a variety of stories. Because we wanted The Reach to feel intimidating, it was important that characters had a sense of vulnerability. Like a player jumping into a new game, we wanted the characters to feel simultaneously ill-prepared and ready for anything.
The spaceships were actually heavily influenced by hot rods. We liked how these powerful machines had a lot of individuality and room for expression. We wanted each ship to have a unique personality, feel like it was one-of-kind, and let players express themselves with them as we add more ships and more customization.
In the end, we want everything to be in support of the gameplay players are experiencing. Wildgate is chaotic, challenging, and playful. We try to weave those feelings into everything we create.
Rick Gilliland, Technical Art Director: We wanted to find our own little unique corner of sci-fi. We were inspired by the great classics in that space like Star Wars and Star Trek. We also wanted to pull in the charm and fun of cultural touchstones like Saturday morning cartoons and Jim Henson’s various creations.
We wanted The Reach to feel wondrous and challenging all at once, so we looked at a lot of powerful natural phenomena like thunderstorms and huge waves. We wanted you to feel like you were in space, but not space like you’ve ever seen it, so that involved drawing from a lot of non-space reference images, like cloud tanks, esoteric animals, and microscope images.
For characters, we set out to create a range of characters that would let us tell a variety of stories. Because we wanted The Reach to feel intimidating, it was important that characters had a sense of vulnerability. Like a player jumping into a new game, we wanted the characters to feel simultaneously ill-prepared and ready for anything.
The spaceships were actually heavily influenced by hot rods. We liked how these powerful machines had a lot of individuality and room for expression. We wanted each ship to have a unique personality, feel like it was one-of-kind, and let players express themselves with them as we add more ships and more customization.
In the end, we want everything to be in support of the gameplay players are experiencing. Wildgate is chaotic, challenging, and playful. We try to weave those feelings into everything we create.
As the debut project for Moonshot Games, what would you say were your core goals for Wildgate as a studio?
GM: I’ll tackle this from two perspectives: as a player and as a developer.
As a player, we wanted Wildgate to be a source of player stories, where players always walked away from a game session with a tale of some cool thing that had happened to them or some cunning plan they’d tried successfully or otherwise. The unpredictable interactions with other human players is one of the key joys of PvP multiplayer. We’re science fiction fans at Moonshot and wanted to make a space combat sandbox for these stories to unfold in.
As a developer and as a studio, it was important that whatever game we picked, it was something that everyone in the studio felt they could easily contribute to creatively. In a sandbox like Wildgate, it’s easy for anyone on the team to have a half-baked-but-exciting idea about a ship upgrade, a player or ship weapon, a piece of equipment, etc., and for us to prototype it quickly. The Wildgate you see today is very much a sum of Moonshot’s team as a whole.
GM: I’ll tackle this from two perspectives: as a player and as a developer.
As a player, we wanted Wildgate to be a source of player stories, where players always walked away from a game session with a tale of some cool thing that had happened to them or some cunning plan they’d tried successfully or otherwise. The unpredictable interactions with other human players is one of the key joys of PvP multiplayer. We’re science fiction fans at Moonshot and wanted to make a space combat sandbox for these stories to unfold in.
As a developer and as a studio, it was important that whatever game we picked, it was something that everyone in the studio felt they could easily contribute to creatively. In a sandbox like Wildgate, it’s easy for anyone on the team to have a half-baked-but-exciting idea about a ship upgrade, a player or ship weapon, a piece of equipment, etc., and for us to prototype it quickly. The Wildgate you see today is very much a sum of Moonshot’s team as a whole.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
Could you please explain your evaluation process for selecting an engine to develop your debut project with?
GM: We had a few guiding principles in mind when we were considering how to build Wildgate:
We ruled out building our own engine quickly because we knew we’d want to spend that development time prototyping and experimenting instead. We knew we’d be doing a session-based multiplayer game with a modest player count and, in March 2020, there was also this pandemic thing brewing which meant we’d likely need to do all of this remotely for the first time. We had a lot of collective experience with proprietary engines in environments where we had access to years of tribal knowledge from colleagues, but going into this venture, that wouldn’t be true anymore, so it was important we picked something where we could find that knowledge base externally.
GM: We had a few guiding principles in mind when we were considering how to build Wildgate:
- Everyone can contribute to the development of the game
- The game will be crossplay on the big current-gen platforms
- Keep the studio headcount modest to help maintain sustainability
We ruled out building our own engine quickly because we knew we’d want to spend that development time prototyping and experimenting instead. We knew we’d be doing a session-based multiplayer game with a modest player count and, in March 2020, there was also this pandemic thing brewing which meant we’d likely need to do all of this remotely for the first time. We had a lot of collective experience with proprietary engines in environments where we had access to years of tribal knowledge from colleagues, but going into this venture, that wouldn’t be true anymore, so it was important we picked something where we could find that knowledge base externally.
Why was Unreal Engine 5 chosen for this game and how did it enable you and the team to achieve your goals?
GM: We were drawn to Unreal Engine because it had a track record of successful multiplayer titles behind it already, we’d have access to the source code if we wanted it, it has support for a variety of target platforms out the gate, it has a large online community of professional and hobbyist developers and tutorials, and it offers plenty of mechanisms for people to prototype quickly with tools like Blueprint, Niagara, replication, etc.
Something I think is often overlooked is that it also comes with a robust build toolchain—this made it easy for us to get a prototype built and distributed to each other remotely within the first couple of weeks of development so we could start playtesting our multiplayer game. We officially started Wildgate development March 13, 2020, and our first multiplayer playtest took place—remotely, thanks to COVID—one month later!
Access to the source code has been huge. The vanilla Unreal Engine has been an excellent platform to build Wildgate from but, like many games, Wildgate has a few areas where we’ve benefited from customizing our approach. Most of the time we’ve been able to do this simply as a plugin or set of modules within Unreal’s existing architecture. In a few places, we’ve customized the engine code itself to enable some of the very Wildgate-specific behaviors or meet very Wildgate-specific performance needs.
We’ve also benefited enormously from the collective wisdom of the Unreal development community through the Unreal Developer Network forums and from direct support via Epic’s Pro Support ticket system.
GM: We were drawn to Unreal Engine because it had a track record of successful multiplayer titles behind it already, we’d have access to the source code if we wanted it, it has support for a variety of target platforms out the gate, it has a large online community of professional and hobbyist developers and tutorials, and it offers plenty of mechanisms for people to prototype quickly with tools like Blueprint, Niagara, replication, etc.
Something I think is often overlooked is that it also comes with a robust build toolchain—this made it easy for us to get a prototype built and distributed to each other remotely within the first couple of weeks of development so we could start playtesting our multiplayer game. We officially started Wildgate development March 13, 2020, and our first multiplayer playtest took place—remotely, thanks to COVID—one month later!
Access to the source code has been huge. The vanilla Unreal Engine has been an excellent platform to build Wildgate from but, like many games, Wildgate has a few areas where we’ve benefited from customizing our approach. Most of the time we’ve been able to do this simply as a plugin or set of modules within Unreal’s existing architecture. In a few places, we’ve customized the engine code itself to enable some of the very Wildgate-specific behaviors or meet very Wildgate-specific performance needs.
We’ve also benefited enormously from the collective wisdom of the Unreal development community through the Unreal Developer Network forums and from direct support via Epic’s Pro Support ticket system.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
In Wildgate, players are encouraged to outgun or outrun their opponents to achieve victory. How does this play out in the gameplay?
GM: There are two ways to win a game of Wildgate: capture the Artifact and take it through the Wildgate, or be the last ship left standing . . . flying? The last ship remaining. While players enter The Reach with a degree of autonomy over their own loadout—their hero, their equipment, their weapons, their ship—once they’re in The Reach, a crew has to make their own luck in terms of which ship upgrades they find, which encounters with other crews they take or avoid, which information they gather with their probes, and so on.
Players will constantly be making choices about what their crew should be doing in the moment relative to the evolving state of the match: Do they complete one more point of interest for better ship upgrades? Do they gather more fuel and more ice so they’re prepared for ship combat? Does that enemy ship over there really need that laser ram, or would it look so much better on our own ship?
There’s a high degree of asymmetry in play among the crews in a match, and that gives players a lot of room for creativity in how they approach their time in The Reach.
GM: There are two ways to win a game of Wildgate: capture the Artifact and take it through the Wildgate, or be the last ship left standing . . . flying? The last ship remaining. While players enter The Reach with a degree of autonomy over their own loadout—their hero, their equipment, their weapons, their ship—once they’re in The Reach, a crew has to make their own luck in terms of which ship upgrades they find, which encounters with other crews they take or avoid, which information they gather with their probes, and so on.
Players will constantly be making choices about what their crew should be doing in the moment relative to the evolving state of the match: Do they complete one more point of interest for better ship upgrades? Do they gather more fuel and more ice so they’re prepared for ship combat? Does that enemy ship over there really need that laser ram, or would it look so much better on our own ship?
There’s a high degree of asymmetry in play among the crews in a match, and that gives players a lot of room for creativity in how they approach their time in The Reach.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
What were your goals when setting out to design the game’s playable characters and how did UE5 help you bring your vision for them to life?
RG: The team really wanted to create memorable, unique characters. We wanted you to be able to tell who each character was instantly at any distance. So from the start, we knew we were going to use different skeletons and different rigs. The flexibility and speed of Unreal’s animation workflows was critical to making this happen for us with our small team. We were able to share key parts of Animation Blueprints, use Post Process Animation Blueprints to add unique flavor to each character, and use the built in Animation Retargeting workflows to get new character prototypes up and running quickly.
Unreal has also been great for collaborating with external partners. It’s been easy to share content and workflows with excellent developers like those at Superseed Studios and Airborn Studios. Thanks to the expansiveness of the Unreal community, collaborating with other studios is easy, and these partnerships can be super productive from day one.
RG: The team really wanted to create memorable, unique characters. We wanted you to be able to tell who each character was instantly at any distance. So from the start, we knew we were going to use different skeletons and different rigs. The flexibility and speed of Unreal’s animation workflows was critical to making this happen for us with our small team. We were able to share key parts of Animation Blueprints, use Post Process Animation Blueprints to add unique flavor to each character, and use the built in Animation Retargeting workflows to get new character prototypes up and running quickly.
Unreal has also been great for collaborating with external partners. It’s been easy to share content and workflows with excellent developers like those at Superseed Studios and Airborn Studios. Thanks to the expansiveness of the Unreal community, collaborating with other studios is easy, and these partnerships can be super productive from day one.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
What can you tell us about the ships in the game and how players will consistently need to maintain them while looking to sabotage other players’ ships?
GM: The ships in Wildgate are where our prospectors spend most of their time, even when they’re not exploring The Reach in search of ancient artifacts. These are not the clean-lined space yachts used for leisure cruises between worlds or the sleek star fighters of the Accord Navy. These are well-loved, ramshackle machines that are regularly exposed to the weirdest part of space ever navigated by sentient beings.
As a player, it’s reasonable to expect your ship will be on fire and leaking oxygen more often than not. The windows and doors will break, causing the oxygen levels to drop. Fires will spontaneously burst out and spread throughout the interior. Both of these are things the players will need to address with their trusty Multitool. There are many ways a ship can be damaged and—in the case of direct impacts to the hull and fires—that damage translates to reactor damage.
Each ship has a fixed amount of reactor damage it can take before it’ll explode. Players can apply reactor coolant—a resource mined from ice asteroids in The Reach—to restore damage that their reactor has taken, so this is something they need to be vigilant about. While individual players can always respawn on their own ship if they meet their end, once their ship is destroyed, that’s it!
GM: The ships in Wildgate are where our prospectors spend most of their time, even when they’re not exploring The Reach in search of ancient artifacts. These are not the clean-lined space yachts used for leisure cruises between worlds or the sleek star fighters of the Accord Navy. These are well-loved, ramshackle machines that are regularly exposed to the weirdest part of space ever navigated by sentient beings.
As a player, it’s reasonable to expect your ship will be on fire and leaking oxygen more often than not. The windows and doors will break, causing the oxygen levels to drop. Fires will spontaneously burst out and spread throughout the interior. Both of these are things the players will need to address with their trusty Multitool. There are many ways a ship can be damaged and—in the case of direct impacts to the hull and fires—that damage translates to reactor damage.
Each ship has a fixed amount of reactor damage it can take before it’ll explode. Players can apply reactor coolant—a resource mined from ice asteroids in The Reach—to restore damage that their reactor has taken, so this is something they need to be vigilant about. While individual players can always respawn on their own ship if they meet their end, once their ship is destroyed, that’s it!
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
How did UE5 help you to create the technical aspect of space physics and gravity that enables the epic space battle of Wildgate?
GM: Each ship is effectively split into two parts from a movement perspective: a simulating physics body with an artist-authored but fairly simple convex hull, and a kinematic body with a hierarchy of attachments that make up all of the interesting elements of a ship that the players see and interact with. When dealing with as many components as we have here, care needs to be taken to ensure that moving a ship around the world remains a performant operation. UE5 provided us with plenty of tools to solve this problem, using Unreal Insights to identify bottlenecks and leveraging things like welding in Chaos to simplify the pressure on the physics system.
We avoided the six degrees of freedom that you might typically expect from a game that takes place in space, favoring instead a simpler physical model with conventional “vertical” gravity similar to what you see in properties like Star Wars. Primarily we made this choice to reduce the complexity of movement for players (and to free up more buttons on the gamepad), but conveniently it meant we could get more mileage out of the Character Movement Component provided by UE5.
Moving around inside a ship that is itself moving and rotating was a tricky thing to get feeling right. With access to the Unreal Engine source code, we were able to modify and extend the existing character mover to enable this behavior in a way that feels good as a player without having to write a completely bespoke movement system.
GM: Each ship is effectively split into two parts from a movement perspective: a simulating physics body with an artist-authored but fairly simple convex hull, and a kinematic body with a hierarchy of attachments that make up all of the interesting elements of a ship that the players see and interact with. When dealing with as many components as we have here, care needs to be taken to ensure that moving a ship around the world remains a performant operation. UE5 provided us with plenty of tools to solve this problem, using Unreal Insights to identify bottlenecks and leveraging things like welding in Chaos to simplify the pressure on the physics system.
We avoided the six degrees of freedom that you might typically expect from a game that takes place in space, favoring instead a simpler physical model with conventional “vertical” gravity similar to what you see in properties like Star Wars. Primarily we made this choice to reduce the complexity of movement for players (and to free up more buttons on the gamepad), but conveniently it meant we could get more mileage out of the Character Movement Component provided by UE5.
Moving around inside a ship that is itself moving and rotating was a tricky thing to get feeling right. With access to the Unreal Engine source code, we were able to modify and extend the existing character mover to enable this behavior in a way that feels good as a player without having to write a completely bespoke movement system.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
What can you tell us about the game’s arsenal of weapons, gadgets, and traps, and how did UE5 help you develop them?
RG: Blueprint unlocks a lot of creativity here. Not only are our designers able to get new ideas into the game quickly, but almost any member of the team can jump in and make a pitch, too. At various phases of development, we would have hackathon weeks where people could explore ideas they thought would be good for the game.
We have a couple of great examples of that. The Laser Ram, a piece of equipment you strap to your ship to go carve into other ships like a saw, was prototyped during one of those sessions. The Void Turbine, a spaceship engine that players can grab on to to propel themselves through space is another that was built in a similar way. These sorts of prototypes find their way into internal playtests quite often, and that’s an important part of the process of finding the fun.
Wildgate is at its best when players are finding joyous and creative ways to combine the gadgets they find. The game is very much a sandbox experience, and in Unreal, if you’ve built your game right, it can be very easy to bolt together components in a sandbox way to experiment and find the fun. Then, as ideas become more solidified, encapsulating functionality into components and pulling them into C++ helps keep everything running smoothly.
RG: Blueprint unlocks a lot of creativity here. Not only are our designers able to get new ideas into the game quickly, but almost any member of the team can jump in and make a pitch, too. At various phases of development, we would have hackathon weeks where people could explore ideas they thought would be good for the game.
We have a couple of great examples of that. The Laser Ram, a piece of equipment you strap to your ship to go carve into other ships like a saw, was prototyped during one of those sessions. The Void Turbine, a spaceship engine that players can grab on to to propel themselves through space is another that was built in a similar way. These sorts of prototypes find their way into internal playtests quite often, and that’s an important part of the process of finding the fun.
Wildgate is at its best when players are finding joyous and creative ways to combine the gadgets they find. The game is very much a sandbox experience, and in Unreal, if you’ve built your game right, it can be very easy to bolt together components in a sandbox way to experiment and find the fun. Then, as ideas become more solidified, encapsulating functionality into components and pulling them into C++ helps keep everything running smoothly.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
In Wildgate, players navigate large, procedurally-generated maps that change with every game. Were there any specific features of UE5 that helped you bring this aspect of Wildgate to life?
RG: Proceduralism has been a major part of our development process. We knew from the beginning that it was important for the game to get that system right, so we put a lot of engineering effort into procedural map generation.
We actually build the whole map locally on every player’s machine at the start of the game. This helps us keep download sizes small, and help players get into games quicker. Performance of that system was incredibly important, because it became analogous to load times for us. Unreal Insights was an incredible tool for helping us, and `TRACE_CPUPROFILER_EVENT_SCOPE` quickly became one of our favorite lines to add to functions.
For a fully dynamic map, it cannot be understated how awesome it is to have Lumen, and on lower settings, Screen Space Global Illumination. It would have been a nightmare to try to manage light bakes for our dynamic locations and all their variations. With Unreal’s dynamic lighting solutions, we’re able to drop any model into the world we want and trust that the lighting will look great.
RG: Proceduralism has been a major part of our development process. We knew from the beginning that it was important for the game to get that system right, so we put a lot of engineering effort into procedural map generation.
We actually build the whole map locally on every player’s machine at the start of the game. This helps us keep download sizes small, and help players get into games quicker. Performance of that system was incredibly important, because it became analogous to load times for us. Unreal Insights was an incredible tool for helping us, and `TRACE_CPUPROFILER_EVENT_SCOPE` quickly became one of our favorite lines to add to functions.
For a fully dynamic map, it cannot be understated how awesome it is to have Lumen, and on lower settings, Screen Space Global Illumination. It would have been a nightmare to try to manage light bakes for our dynamic locations and all their variations. With Unreal’s dynamic lighting solutions, we’re able to drop any model into the world we want and trust that the lighting will look great.
Early previews have expressed that the game’s fun factor plays a big role in the experience. Was this a key component of the game’s design from the onset?
RG: We are passionate about playtesting at Moonshot. The very first piece of technology we built for Wildgate was the ability to distribute a build and playtest it. When Grant had the very first experiment running based on the First Person Template, we all pulled it down and played it together.
We’ve been playtesting Wildgate two to three times a week for one to two hours since day one in March 2020. Playtesting is the heartbeat of the team. When you’re playtesting that much, it becomes clear quite quickly what is and isn’t working. Everyone knows what’s important to the experience, and we can focus our efforts on what really matters.
Early on, this focus helped us validate that the overall idea of Wildgate was fun. Feedback from playtests also drove initiatives like a focus on making the combat more responsive and impactful.
Today, it still helps us prioritize initiatives. Prototypes go in, and we can quickly decide if we want to take the ideas to completion, cut them, or save them for later.
Playtesting as much as we do also helps us consistently prioritize performance, as games are much easier to evaluate when the experience is running smoothly. So after every playtest, if there is a performance issue, we identify it and make sure it won’t hurt the next one.
Game development can also be a difficult process, and the pandemic was no easy time. Having the playtests to always look forward to was one of the things that really kept up momentum for the team. There is always the next playtest coming up, and the next thing to get in or polish more to try to create more joy. And if we did it right, that joy comes through for players in the finished game.
RG: We are passionate about playtesting at Moonshot. The very first piece of technology we built for Wildgate was the ability to distribute a build and playtest it. When Grant had the very first experiment running based on the First Person Template, we all pulled it down and played it together.
We’ve been playtesting Wildgate two to three times a week for one to two hours since day one in March 2020. Playtesting is the heartbeat of the team. When you’re playtesting that much, it becomes clear quite quickly what is and isn’t working. Everyone knows what’s important to the experience, and we can focus our efforts on what really matters.
Early on, this focus helped us validate that the overall idea of Wildgate was fun. Feedback from playtests also drove initiatives like a focus on making the combat more responsive and impactful.
Today, it still helps us prioritize initiatives. Prototypes go in, and we can quickly decide if we want to take the ideas to completion, cut them, or save them for later.
Playtesting as much as we do also helps us consistently prioritize performance, as games are much easier to evaluate when the experience is running smoothly. So after every playtest, if there is a performance issue, we identify it and make sure it won’t hurt the next one.
Game development can also be a difficult process, and the pandemic was no easy time. Having the playtests to always look forward to was one of the things that really kept up momentum for the team. There is always the next playtest coming up, and the next thing to get in or polish more to try to create more joy. And if we did it right, that joy comes through for players in the finished game.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
Was Wildgate’s stylized, vibrant visual style something you planned from the beginning or did it evolve over time? Also, how did UE support your team in executing on your artistic vision?
RG: Being vibrant and stylized was part of the plan from the beginning, but the specifics of it came together over the lifetime of development as each artist came onto the project and added their unique skills.
One of the core goals for Wildgate’s visuals was to give players a sense of awe and wonder as they explored the ever-evolving world of The Reach. This was paired with a team value around gameplay clarity. Because the game, and the way you navigate it, is pretty unique, it required us to be creative. We had unusual problems that had unusual solutions.
A great example is our spaceships. They look a little cobbled together, and we love that lived-in feeling. We got there because the ships are actually cobbled together through dozens of iterations. We ripped apart and reassembled the ships so many times trying to find the right gameplay. So the ship visuals themselves reflect this process.
As it relates specifically to Unreal, there is certainly the obvious flexibility that comes from Niagara and custom Materials, but one of the hidden gems is actually Unreal’s support for High Dynamic Range (HDR). So that the game feels as vibrant as possible when players have the right monitors, we started authoring content with HDR and Wide Color Gamut very early on. The built-in support and solid tonemapping support for Low Dynamic Range (LDR) made it so that most of our content worked naively in both HDR and LDR.
RG: Being vibrant and stylized was part of the plan from the beginning, but the specifics of it came together over the lifetime of development as each artist came onto the project and added their unique skills.
One of the core goals for Wildgate’s visuals was to give players a sense of awe and wonder as they explored the ever-evolving world of The Reach. This was paired with a team value around gameplay clarity. Because the game, and the way you navigate it, is pretty unique, it required us to be creative. We had unusual problems that had unusual solutions.
A great example is our spaceships. They look a little cobbled together, and we love that lived-in feeling. We got there because the ships are actually cobbled together through dozens of iterations. We ripped apart and reassembled the ships so many times trying to find the right gameplay. So the ship visuals themselves reflect this process.
As it relates specifically to Unreal, there is certainly the obvious flexibility that comes from Niagara and custom Materials, but one of the hidden gems is actually Unreal’s support for High Dynamic Range (HDR). So that the game feels as vibrant as possible when players have the right monitors, we started authoring content with HDR and Wide Color Gamut very early on. The built-in support and solid tonemapping support for Low Dynamic Range (LDR) made it so that most of our content worked naively in both HDR and LDR.
How did you get the balance right between visual fidelity and optimal performance across different platforms?
RG: We tried to look at things from the perspective of the different players who might want to play the game. Maybe you’re a player with top-end hardware who wants to be wowed by stunning visuals. Or maybe you’re a player who wants a high frame rate to have the most responsiveness in combat. Or maybe you’ve got an older machine, but you really want to jump into the game with your friend. From this we came up with our Scalability strategy, supporting players who want “Minimal,” “Fast,” “Balanced,” or “Beautiful” experiences.
Aligning these four strategies with Unreal’s default scalability settings was quite easy. Most configurations worked correctly out of the box, and we only had to tweak a few settings, such as specific Lumen, Virtual Shadow Map, and Texture Streaming settings to adapt the performance profile to better match the unique aspects of our game.
RG: We tried to look at things from the perspective of the different players who might want to play the game. Maybe you’re a player with top-end hardware who wants to be wowed by stunning visuals. Or maybe you’re a player who wants a high frame rate to have the most responsiveness in combat. Or maybe you’ve got an older machine, but you really want to jump into the game with your friend. From this we came up with our Scalability strategy, supporting players who want “Minimal,” “Fast,” “Balanced,” or “Beautiful” experiences.
Aligning these four strategies with Unreal’s default scalability settings was quite easy. Most configurations worked correctly out of the box, and we only had to tweak a few settings, such as specific Lumen, Virtual Shadow Map, and Texture Streaming settings to adapt the performance profile to better match the unique aspects of our game.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
Effective traversal of Wildgate’s environments and ships seems to play a big role in the experience. Which aspects of UE5 have been utilized to make the player movement mechanics in the game feel just right?
GM: Player movement in Wildgate is a little unconventional in that it also takes place inside spaceships that are themselves moving—like a series of flying FPS levels that players are hopping between, if those levels also had guns and were trying to blow each other up. Being able to leverage debug tools like the Visual Logger makes it much easier to diagnose the inevitable network misprediction issues that arise when authoring complicated real-time player movement systems in a multiplayer game.
We’ve made heavy use of the built-in Character Movement Component with some custom modifications to support rotation-based movement. In addition to this, we also leverage the Gameplay Ability System to give players other movement tools, such as the Magnet Hook, Thunderdash, and Adrian’s jetpack.
Additionally, we’ve been able to leverage Chaos to add fun physics-flavored toys for our players in the form of things like the Void Turbine, Clamp Jets, and Tractor Beams, all of which add an extra layer of dynamic movement to a match of Wildgate.
GM: Player movement in Wildgate is a little unconventional in that it also takes place inside spaceships that are themselves moving—like a series of flying FPS levels that players are hopping between, if those levels also had guns and were trying to blow each other up. Being able to leverage debug tools like the Visual Logger makes it much easier to diagnose the inevitable network misprediction issues that arise when authoring complicated real-time player movement systems in a multiplayer game.
We’ve made heavy use of the built-in Character Movement Component with some custom modifications to support rotation-based movement. In addition to this, we also leverage the Gameplay Ability System to give players other movement tools, such as the Magnet Hook, Thunderdash, and Adrian’s jetpack.
Additionally, we’ve been able to leverage Chaos to add fun physics-flavored toys for our players in the form of things like the Void Turbine, Clamp Jets, and Tractor Beams, all of which add an extra layer of dynamic movement to a match of Wildgate.
Were there any parts of development that went faster as a result of working with Unreal Engine? If so, how much time do you estimate was saved?
RG: LOL, after working with Unreal I never want to make another Level-of-Detail model ever again! Between Nanite and the built-in model simplification, we probably cut out something like one fourth of our modeling workload. I don’t think I can turn that into an hour estimate, but it definitely lets us focus on the fun and creative part of making art.
RG: LOL, after working with Unreal I never want to make another Level-of-Detail model ever again! Between Nanite and the built-in model simplification, we probably cut out something like one fourth of our modeling workload. I don’t think I can turn that into an hour estimate, but it definitely lets us focus on the fun and creative part of making art.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
Which Unreal Engine 5 features have stood out to you most during development?
RG: Nanite is a truly impressive technology. At first we were skeptical. Our art style doesn’t demand ultra-high resolution static meshes like those shown in the Nanite demos. Once we started switching meshes over though, we were amazed by the results.
Switching to Nanite made it so we could draw shadows on distant meshes, and even better, our shadow-rendering costs went down. The Nanite fallback meshes are great approximations for collision, so we needed to worry less about various LOD presets, or fiddling with custom collision meshes.
Then once we started leaning into the Nanite workflow, we stopped needing to retopologize static meshes or debug bake artifacts. We were able to move much faster and focus on the fun and creative part of making art for Wildgate.
RG: Nanite is a truly impressive technology. At first we were skeptical. Our art style doesn’t demand ultra-high resolution static meshes like those shown in the Nanite demos. Once we started switching meshes over though, we were amazed by the results.
Switching to Nanite made it so we could draw shadows on distant meshes, and even better, our shadow-rendering costs went down. The Nanite fallback meshes are great approximations for collision, so we needed to worry less about various LOD presets, or fiddling with custom collision meshes.
Then once we started leaning into the Nanite workflow, we stopped needing to retopologize static meshes or debug bake artifacts. We were able to move much faster and focus on the fun and creative part of making art for Wildgate.
Did the Epic Development Community, Unreal Engine documentation, Fab Marketplace, or other components of the Epic ecosystem assist you during development?
GM: We’ve used all of these things effectively at different stages of Wildgate’s development.
Early on while we were kicking around our original prototype and our team was tiny, we picked up a handful of asset packs from the Unreal Engine Marketplace [now Fab] to use in our greybox experiments: lots of miscellaneous sci-fi stuff that helped us focus on finding the fun before we’d figured out our art style and content pipelines.
Having such an active development community has generated a wealth of searchable knowledge on the community forums and within the Unreal Developer Network. There are also a surprising number of adjacent communities in places like Discord that are just packed with people doing cool and interesting things with Unreal Engine.
GM: We’ve used all of these things effectively at different stages of Wildgate’s development.
Early on while we were kicking around our original prototype and our team was tiny, we picked up a handful of asset packs from the Unreal Engine Marketplace [now Fab] to use in our greybox experiments: lots of miscellaneous sci-fi stuff that helped us focus on finding the fun before we’d figured out our art style and content pipelines.
Having such an active development community has generated a wealth of searchable knowledge on the community forums and within the Unreal Developer Network. There are also a surprising number of adjacent communities in places like Discord that are just packed with people doing cool and interesting things with Unreal Engine.
Images courtesy of Moonshot Games, a Dreamhaven studio
Could you please provide a little more detail on how you tweaked UE’s source?
RG: I think most of our engineering team has a background in custom engines. The team is very used to being able to get down to the nuts and bolts of something, know exactly how it works, and create code and content that gets every last drop of performance we can. Having access to Unreal’s source made us feel at home in that respect.
We made a lot of custom extensions. We created custom types that worked with Blueprint Operators. We created AnimNotifies that let us pass extra parameters to Niagara systems we triggered in Animations. We built out custom AnimNodes that helped bring characters to life, and we did things like create wrappers around FDeferredDecalProxy to allow us to spawn decals on moving spaceships without creating performance problems.
Epic’s Developer Community answers and examples gave us the template of how to make these things in a way that kept things smooth through every engine upgrade from where we started in 4.23 to launching the game with 5.5.
RG: I think most of our engineering team has a background in custom engines. The team is very used to being able to get down to the nuts and bolts of something, know exactly how it works, and create code and content that gets every last drop of performance we can. Having access to Unreal’s source made us feel at home in that respect.
We made a lot of custom extensions. We created custom types that worked with Blueprint Operators. We created AnimNotifies that let us pass extra parameters to Niagara systems we triggered in Animations. We built out custom AnimNodes that helped bring characters to life, and we did things like create wrappers around FDeferredDecalProxy to allow us to spawn decals on moving spaceships without creating performance problems.
Epic’s Developer Community answers and examples gave us the template of how to make these things in a way that kept things smooth through every engine upgrade from where we started in 4.23 to launching the game with 5.5.
How does working in Unreal Engine help foster a cohesive and collaborative workflow between engineering and departments like art, design, audio etc?
RG: Unreal’s workflows have a nice balance of having well-defined handoffs and letting people jump in and learn how to augment things themselves. We have engineers who have made Niagara Systems for artists to later fill in, or VFX artists who carefully set up their User Parameters, so that designers using the Niagara Systems can easily customize them to their specific use.
RG: Unreal’s workflows have a nice balance of having well-defined handoffs and letting people jump in and learn how to augment things themselves. We have engineers who have made Niagara Systems for artists to later fill in, or VFX artists who carefully set up their User Parameters, so that designers using the Niagara Systems can easily customize them to their specific use.
What advice would you give to other studios building systems-rich games like Wildgate?
GM: For us, playtesting often has been fundamental to making Wildgate the game that it is. We take what we like to call the “crawl, walk, run” approach when we’re building most things, and that is especially true when we’re toying with an idea for a new ship or prospector or even something as seemingly simple as a hardpoint device. Take a rough stab and get it into a playtest as quickly as possible, see how it pans out. This has worked well for many things from gameplay ideas to UI layouts to performance optimizations. We make sure that playtest feedback is discussed in the open as well; it helps with contextualizing and seeing what does or doesn’t align with the direction we’d intended a feature or mechanic to go.
We built our toolchain from the start with playtesting in mind, because we knew that it would be a fundamental part of our development lifecycle and studio culture. In fact, we had a build-distribution-and-playtesting tool ready before we’d even gotten our first multiplayer build of Wildgate up and running!
GM: For us, playtesting often has been fundamental to making Wildgate the game that it is. We take what we like to call the “crawl, walk, run” approach when we’re building most things, and that is especially true when we’re toying with an idea for a new ship or prospector or even something as seemingly simple as a hardpoint device. Take a rough stab and get it into a playtest as quickly as possible, see how it pans out. This has worked well for many things from gameplay ideas to UI layouts to performance optimizations. We make sure that playtest feedback is discussed in the open as well; it helps with contextualizing and seeing what does or doesn’t align with the direction we’d intended a feature or mechanic to go.
We built our toolchain from the start with playtesting in mind, because we knew that it would be a fundamental part of our development lifecycle and studio culture. In fact, we had a build-distribution-and-playtesting tool ready before we’d even gotten our first multiplayer build of Wildgate up and running!
Thanks so much for your time! Where can people go to learn more about Wildgate?
GM: Thanks again for having us, and we’d love for everyone to check out the game and learn more at playwildgate.com!
GM: Thanks again for having us, and we’d love for everyone to check out the game and learn more at playwildgate.com!