STARL Metaverse Project / Warp Nexus
Space-themed online world on Unreal Engine 5, with a real-time economy and an MMO space flight game.
- Layers
- UE5, Gameplay, UI, Engine, Multiplayer, Backend, CI/CD, DevOps
- For
- STARL, via Wyrmbyte
- Year
- 2023
STARL is a space-themed online world built on Unreal Engine 5, where players explore, socialize, and play together. Its flagship game, Warp Nexus, is an MMO space flight game with galaxy exploration, space pirate combat, customizable ships, and a trading economy driven by both players and AI. STARL launched in early access in April 2023.
Contract work through Wyrmbyte, where the project began as Warp Nexus in 2018 and I set up its first AWS dedicated server orchestration. I worked on STARL from September 2021 to December 2022.
What I worked on
- Integrated the backend with Nakama for player and game state
- Helped build a real-time economy simulation covering supply, demand, and the movement of resources across the universe, driving dynamic player missions
- Built the instance travel system, where each doorway in the central hub handed the player off to that destination’s own instance server and spawned them at the matching entrance on the other side
- Built live-streamed concerts, with a feed ingested through AWS Elemental MediaLive and broadcast into a multiplayer arena in the game client
- Set up dedicated server hosting with AWS GameLift integration and orchestration
- Built a custom patcher and launcher using PatchKit
- Did UI programming for many of the client’s menus and screens
- Managed several Unreal Engine version upgrades over the life of the project
- Designed, built, and maintained the CI/CD pipeline end to end, including build deployment