Fifty-plus Altered crashing the airlock. Muzzle flash, painted HUD V2, weapon degradation and ammo pressure all colliding in one chaotic horde fight. The combat loop has bite.
DEV DIARY #12
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #12, Power Overload Testing
Pushing the Power System V1 past its limits. Multi-generator networks, sustained overload trips, lights flickering and dying as the load tips over. The base finally has a pulse you can break.
DEV DIARY #11
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #11, Testing the Underground Vibe
Walking the corridors of the airlock with power, lights, ambient hums and fluorescent flicker all working together. The mood is landing. It feels lived-in down there.
DEV DIARY #10
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #10, Building the Demo City (Timelapse)
A timelapse run through the demo city build. Procedural roads and buildings traced in, City Block Breaker exploding hero blocks for hand-art-direction, foliage cascading across rubble. Ashgate taking shape.
DEV DIARY #9
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #9, Working UI
The painted concept-art UI direction landed in engine. Inventory, build menu, compass, every panel rebuilt on the painted style. Module padlocks. Auto-flashlight that engages in the dark.
7 May 2026
Procedural Pipeline V1 shipped
Procedural city tool traces streets and arrays buildings. City Block Breaker editor utility explodes any block into individually editable static meshes so hero locations can be hand-art-directed, then baked back into instanced meshes for performance. The Foliage Cascade tool, marketplace-ready, spawns hierarchical biomes of trees, juveniles, saplings, ground cover, and scrub across landscape and static meshes. PCG Foliage Baker bakes any procedural output into the level's InstancedFoliageActor for editing in the standard Foliage Painter. PCG_Include and PCG_Remove tags scope where foliage spawns. Ashgate finally has its overgrowth.
1 May 2026
Three flagship systems landed
A single Friday session that landed three flagship systems. The HUD V2 painted UI is now live in engine end-to-end. Power System V1 shipped with generators, multi-generator networks, five-second overload trips, powered lights, ambient audio emitters, status LEDs, vibration, and a fail-attempt boot sequence with audio variations. The Voice + Subtitle pipeline is live: NPC voice lines pre-cache at BeginPlay so first-play has zero hitch, the painted Subtitle Widget pushes speech below the HUD, stack mode supports overlapping voices, and proximity gating prevents distant lines from rendering subtitles when they shouldn't. Auto-flashlight engages in the dark, NPC bump knockback is visceral, gamepad layout is locked across PS5 and Xbox conventions. The airlock has a heartbeat now.
// 04.2026 · Field Log
April 2026
DEV DIARY #8
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #8, Creating the Mining System
Universal Press-to-Interact framework. Ore nodes, depth-based rarity, the mining loop tied to grid depth. Deeper rooms surface rarer ore.
DEV DIARY #7
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #7, My Dog as a Companion
Marv. Follows you, engages enemies, sniffs hidden loot, sits on command. He has poses that lock when the player moves. He's a dog you start to worry about.
DEV DIARY #6
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #6, Semi-Functioning Characters
Settlers walking. Settlers reacting. Settlers standing at their workstation. The C++ NPC backbone proves itself in PIE for the first time.
DEV DIARY #5
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #5, Weapon System & HUD
Weapons that degrade. Ammo that runs out. Pistol and carbine in player hands. Painted HUD readouts feeding directly off the live weapon state.
DEV DIARY #4
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #4, First Gameplay Test
The first time AIRLOCK ran like a game, not a test scene. Walking. Looking. Touching. The dollhouse-to-3D loop firing for real.
29 April 2026
NPCs come alive
First MetaHuman head swapped in for the first story-locked NPC. NPC Foundation V1 is the C++ scaffold; NPCs V1 is what happens when you give it a voice, a face, and a place to stand. Activity Anchor system Phase 1 shipped: designers drop a component onto any piece of content (a chair, a workbench, a planning board) and Settlers naturally wander to it, claim it, and use it. The Bump Component handles physical knockback when Kore walks into a Settler. The 9-state behaviour machine (Idle, Follow, Independent, Tasked, Combat, Flee, Injured, Conversational, Dead) drives every NPC from this point on.
17 April 2026
Canon lockdown day
The biggest canon lockdown day in the project's history. Locked the full Altered class breakdown (Feral with 7 visual sub-types, Familiars, Stalkers, Legion with Geiger-counter mechanic). Locked the 14 Settler classes and their signature modules. Locked the skill system at 8 tiers x 10 sub-levels (80 total levels per skill), 17 parent categories, 130+ sub-skills, with full XP propagation rules (100% sub + 10% parent trickle + 10% cross-skill bleed). Locked the multi-airlock + metro network as core design, not late-game. Locked the ant farm + dual-view camera system. Wrote USkillComponent and SkillTypes in C++. Wrote the AirlockSkillXPWidget popup. Updated performance config for Lumen software-RT. Steamworks account registered (phase 1 done). Updated every section of this website.
14 April 2026
Website visual overhaul
The site has been fully redesigned to match AIRLOCK's in-game UI aesthetic: dark warm palette, cream and bone-white text, grey-forward accents, torn/damaged edges on panels. All blues are gone. Buttons now look like aged parchment, matching the in-game module UI exactly. All dev diary videos embedded. The website finally feels like the game.
13 April 2026
DT_Modules single source of truth
Major codebase refactor complete: DT_Modules is now the single source of truth for all module data. Previously, every Blueprint had its own duplicate display name, description, tier stats, power draw, morale bonus and build time, now all of that lives in the Data Table. The UI panels (Selected, Upgrade, Compare) now pull directly from DT_Modules first, falling back to Blueprint properties only if no DT entry exists. Cleaner, faster, and far easier to balance.
13 April 2026
Tier persistence bug fixed
Save/load tier persistence bug fixed. Modules were always spawning at tier 0 on load, regardless of what tier they were at when saved. Root cause: relying on UE's SaveGame property specifier, which has no effect in AIRLOCK's manual struct-based save system. Fixed by adding CurrentTier to the FPlacedModuleSaveData struct, capturing it from the live actor at save time, and restoring it via SetTier() on load. Tiers now survive a full save/load cycle correctly.
9 April 2026
Website goes live
theairlock.co.uk goes live. Built from scratch, single-page HTML with particle effects, interactive roadmap, dev diary section, and embedded music player. Hosted on GitHub Pages. Domain connected. The game finally has a home on the internet.
9 April 2026
MetaHuman assembled
MetaHuman character (MH_Adrien) successfully assembled in UE5 after fixing a Derived Data Cache issue that was eating 256GB of disk space. Redirected DDC to D: drive. Next step: retarget ALS animations onto the MetaHuman skeleton and swap out the placeholder character.
9 April 2026
Roadmap finalised
Full development roadmap finalised, phases from prototype to multiplayer. Stages: Building the Demo, Funding & Launch, Expanding the World, Global Maps. (Since restructured into 8 industry-standard phases, see the Roadmap page for the live version.)
Surface world pipeline working end-to-end, massive ruined city environment now loading as a playable level. Module system expanded to 14 categories. Full 60-minute demo gameplay loop documented.
// Pre-04.2026 · How It Started
Origins
DEV DIARY #3.5
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #3.5, New Main Menu
Main menu V2. After a fresh visual pass, brightness calibration, the press-any-key splash, and the path from boot to gameplay locked into the painted style guide.
DEV DIARY #3
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #3, First Main Menu
The first main menu in engine. Epilepsy warning, splash, settings shell. Functional, ugly, real.
DEV DIARY #2
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #2, The Code
The ground-up C++ work begins. GridManager. Modules. The skeleton AIRLOCK is built on.
DEV DIARY #1
// VIDEO LOG
Dev Diary #1, The Concept
Where it started. The pitch. The vision. The proof of concept that turned an idea into a project.
