Posted October 25, 2025 by Reaper XeS
#EpicMegaJam #SciFi #Space
This year I wanted to go for something more cinematic and immersive, a looping sci-fi experience inside a mysterious space station. My main focus was atmosphere: the feeling of isolation, malfunction, and repetition.
I decided to build the station using assets from my existing library to save time. The models were great, but I quickly discovered a big challenge — none of them were built to a consistent scale or aligned to the grid.
At first, I tried to block out the level using simple geometry, but when I replaced the blockout with the assets, nothing fit properly. So halfway through the jam, I switched to using Level Instances to assemble the different sections of the station more easily. It wasn’t perfect, but it made iteration much faster.
Most of the gameplay logic was done in C++, and the initial scope was pretty ambitious: I wanted each loop to have subtle randomness in the tasks and deaths, and to feel slightly different every time.
But as the jam clock ticked down, I had to scale things back. I focused on getting the core loop working — completing tasks, dying, and restarting — even if the variations between loops were smaller than I’d hoped.
In the last three hours of the jam, I discovered that the exterior walls of the ship were see-through from the bridge. So I rushed to skin and seal the entire outer shell of the station. It was stressful, but satisfying to see it finally done.
Consistency matters. Even amazing assets become a nightmare if they don’t share a common scale or pivot setup.
Plan for reusability. Level Instances saved me from a lot of manual work late in the process.
Optimize early. I hit a huge size issue near submission, but Unreal’s Matrix Editor with Max Texture Size helped me cut down the build to under 1 GB.
Sound design is powerful. I learned to use Sound Effect Chains to transform my own voice into the ship’s AI — one of my favorite parts of the project.
Even though I didn’t manage to include all the features I wanted, this jam taught me a lot about balancing ambition with practicality, especially when mixing cinematic storytelling and technical gameplay.
I’m proud of how Memory Leak turned out — a strange, looping space story that taught me as much about Unreal as it did about scope, design, and deadlines.