What I build on my own time

A self-directed project to learn Verse and the UEFN toolchain. UEFN gives you a sandbox and takes away most of your tools — no object pooling, no conventional profiler, hard memory ceilings, and a runtime that has to hold 60 fps on Switch and mobile as well as PC. A wave-based arcade shooter is exactly the genre that breaks under those constraints.

I built a custom object pooling system in Verse to keep frame times stable during wave spawns, working around the absence of a built-in pooling pattern in the language, then designed the enemy wave system, enemy behaviour, score rank progression and level randomisation around a fixed entity budget. All 3D models, UI and animation are mine — the art was authored against the same budget the code enforced.

A complete arcade gameplay loop, shipped and stable across every supported platform with no frame-rate regressions during peak waves. Scoped, finished and released solo.

The whole brief was a single static image: a fictional N64 cartridge cover for a game that never existed, drawn by @melodillo. No design document, no asset list, no reference for how any of it moved. Everything had to be derived — what genre it was, what the loop was, and what that art would have looked like running on the hardware it was pretending to ship for.

I designed and built the entire game solo, and authored every asset in it — 3D models, textures, rigging and animation, VFX and UI. The N64 look is reconstructed rather than filtered: I modelled to hard low-poly silhouettes against a deliberately small texture budget and lit flat and high-contrast, so the era's constraints shaped the art while it was being authored instead of being applied as a post-process afterwards. The gameplay was designed around the same reading of the cover — a fast isometric arcade loop, ten stages, built for a gamepad.

Shipped on Windows and macOS. It is the clearest single piece of evidence that the code and the art here are the same person: the only thing in it I didn't make is the cartridge cover it started from.