How I Made a Realistic Coconut Game in Unreal Engine 5

Unreal Engines next gen features will level up indie developers

Like many game developers, I was blown away when Epic Games revealed the new features that they had been working on for UE5. At the time I had no intention of prototyping a game with Unreal 4 let alone an early access and probably unstable version of UE5. I thought that the technology was geared more toward AAA studios, as indie games don’t usually go for hyper realism.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago and some tech-demo releases later and I was ready to give Unreal 5 Early Access a try. With a few moderately short downloads from Quixel I had some of the best-looking assets I had ever dragged into a game engine scene before. Of course, there was some set up to get the rocks and the trees working with the new technology but overall, it was an incredibly expedited process.

For those that don’t know, Unreal Engine 5 has a few big game changing features: mainly Nanite, and Lumen. I’m not going to bore you with the technical jargon about…