Devlog
Building Second Chance
What was attempted, what broke, and what the fix turned out to be. Written for anyone building something similar.
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Getting a MetaHuman from four sessions down to one
The end-to-end route from a reference photo to a dressed, animated NPC in Unreal 5.8, and the traps that had to be paid for one at a time before it became repeatable.
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Ten cabs, one road graph, and the bugs only a fleet could find
Building a working taxi firm — book from the in-game phone, ride in the back, pay on arrival — and the failures that a single test vehicle had hidden for months.
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Clothes that slip down and shred — but only on a body they weren't built for
A garment that looked perfect in the rest pose slid down and tore apart the instant the character walked, and the cause turned out to be the mode the clothing was being driven in rather than anything wrong with the clothing.
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The singer who is on at eight, and the mic she never put down
Building a live turn in the pub — an NPC who leaves the bar, sings for an hour of game time and sits back down — and the two silent failures it cost: a walk target that defaulted to the middle of the map, and a graph edit that compiled perfectly into a chain nothing ever executed.
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Twelve bus stops, and seven of them landed on the empty ring road
Putting a timetabled bus on a real route through the estate — how the stop siting quietly collapsed, why the driver ended up crumpled on the cab floor, and what is still untested.
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The editor had to be shut down before the optimisation would run at all
An open-world map with effectively no level-of-detail data anywhere took the graphics card down twice while trying to fix itself, and the answer was to stop the editor drawing and do the work in three separate headless processes.
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The coin pile never settled, and the frame rate was the reason
Building a working penny pusher out of several hundred real rigid bodies, and the feedback loop where slow frames stop a pile settling, which keeps the bodies awake, which keeps the frames slow.
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Carve the water before you build anything beside it — a 7.7 km river, solved offline and cut into the terrain
The river was solved as data outside the engine, then carved and built as water bodies — and the day's real lesson was ordering, because carving the channel re-graded the ground under a bridge that had been built correctly an hour earlier.