Render targets—the functionality that tells Unreal Engine where to render specific objects and effects—were used to bake in the game’s in-editor icons. The team used procedural meshes and runtime static mesh generation for optimized geometry generation.They integrated a system for tracking and logging player progress using the Achievements Interface—one of the many free resources available to game developers via Epic Online Services.
The team also found support in the Unreal Developer Network (UDN), Epic Games’ premium support resource where dedicated Epic Games staff answer questions. “UDN was super helpful during debugging our on-console compute shaders,” says Dressler. “Having direct access to the Unreal engineers who implemented the systems we needed help with was 110% valuable.”
To create the soundscape for the game, Minakata leveraged Quartz, Unreal Engine’s audio subsystem. “Many Japanese studios insist, and SFX artists prefer, one of the two dominant audio middleware,” says Dressler. “A key technical goal for us on this project was to use zero external dependencies. We succeeded: we don’t use any non-Unreal middleware. This made our console porting faster, cheaper, and less stressful—with less development risk.”
The team also used Quixel Megascans for environment textures and props. Megascans is the world’s largest and fastest growing 3D scans library, packed full of photorealistic 3D scanned tileable surfaces, textures, vegetation, imperfections, atlases, decals and more. For the Minakata team, access to these high-quality ready-to-use assets enabled their artists to focus on hard-surface modeling rather than spending swathes of time perfecting textures and background items.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog