What I've learned during this Jam

Memory Leak — Epic MegaJam 2025 Post-Mortem

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.

The Space Station Design

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.

Gameplay & Scope

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.

The Final Hours

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.

Lessons Learned

• 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.

Final Thoughts

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.