Eligius: a video game built in Unreal Engine
Learning the engine the hard way — by shipping a playable demo
- unreal-engine
- game-dev
- blueprints
- real-time
There is a limit to what you learn about a game engine from tutorials. Eligius is the project where I crossed that limit: a small third-person game built in Unreal Engine 5, from an empty level to a packaged executable that other people could download and play.
What it is
A short, atmospheric exploration demo. The goal was never to ship a commercial game but to touch every part of the pipeline once:
- World building — blocking out the level, then dressing it with Quixel Megascans assets and custom materials.
- Lighting — Lumen global illumination and Nanite geometry, the two features that made UE5 feel like a generational jump, tuned for a 60 fps target on a mid-range GPU.
- Gameplay — character movement, camera, interactions and a simple objective loop, implemented in Blueprints with a few C++ helpers.
- Cinematics — the trailer at the top was rendered from Sequencer with the Movie Render Queue.
- Packaging — building and signing standalone executables for macOS and Windows, which is its own education in platform quirks.
What I took away
- Blueprints scale further than people think, as long as you treat them like code: naming, folders, and a few reusable components.
- Lumen and Nanite change what a solo developer can build. Photoreal lighting without baking, and film-quality assets without LODs, remove two of the most time-consuming steps of the old pipeline.
- Packaging is half the project. Getting a build to run on someone else’s Mac taught me more about the platform than the whole level did.
- This is where the MetaHuman work came from. Once the world existed, I wanted a believable character to put in it — see MetaHuman.
