Epic MegaGrant Index
The Game
What Is HARBINGER
Story outline
Harbinger is an open-world multiplayer survival game, set in a fictional country that is part of the USSR bordering the Western side of Europe (NATO). The events that set up the story take place in 1988, when nuclear reactors all across the outer states of the USSR began to go into meltdown, due to being disabled by electromagnetic pulses (EMPs).
The Soviets wrongly assumed that NATO was to blame, turning the Cold War hot as millions of civilians were forcibly evacuated from their homes towards the interior of the USSR.
This event ultimately spirals into a global nuclear confrontation and escalates into a war between NATO and the USSR. Unbeknownst to both sides these EMPs are triggered by an Ancient Alien species that have returned to Earth to cull humanity. After allowing humankind to self-destruct and weaken themselves through years of war. A few years later, they announce themselves and begin exterminating humanity.
The events of Harbinger take place over a decade after the Alien invasion at a time when all human civilization is destroyed, and all that remains are scattered nomadic survivors. Your character is who you wish them to be. The child of a survivor, or someone who survived the war themselves, from European, to Asian, to African, there are no nationalities in our game, only wandering survivors trying to find refuge from their hunters.
What do you do?
Harbinger has strong exploration, horror, and survival themes and takes place in a multiplayer sandbox setting. A player begins their playthrough spawning at a random location on the coastline with nothing but the clothes on their back, and they must make their own decision on where to head to find items to help them survive.
Once players have tackled their immediate survival needs, they can start looking to explore and gear up more, traveling deeper into the country where higher-value loot and equipment can be found. With greater loot comes greater risk, and more hostile players and alien life are likely to be encountered. Players must learn to navigate this dangerous world while simultaneously progressing their character, and weapon mastery, and attempting to create item storage and camps that remain persistent through their death, unlike the items that they are carrying.
Players can also choose to participate in story and exploration activities, with a large variety of planned Easter eggs and interactable events, including weekly randomized loot events, secret events within named locations on the map, and random alien incursion events where players can choose to take the fight back to the Aliens and gain significant progress to their systems as well as having the chance to find exotic loot.
Ultimately Harbinger is a game that is characterized by a vicious cycle of life and death where players fight to survive, and thrive, against each other, and against a relentless Alien threat.
Key Details
First-person only (potential for a third person mode in the future.)
Max 64-player servers planned.
400km² total area with 256km² playable area.
Core themes: Survival, First Person Shooter, RPG, Horror, Open-World, Sandbox, Exploration.
Alien invading race as the main protagonist.
Heavy progression elements to gameplay loop.
Medium-core survival difficulty.
Focus on next-generation audiovisual fidelity and immersive atmosphere.
What Makes Us Unique Compared To Other Survival Games?
Survival games have exploded in popularity over the past decade and remain one of the most popular genres in gaming, especially among indies, however, they tend to focus more on the survival, crafting, and base-building elements of the game. Harbinger is much more focused on the exploration of the environment, personal character progression, gunplay, and story, both delivered in the game and created between players.
Below we break down some of the main areas we have put our efforts into to make us stand out as a title worth playing.
Innovative Workflows And Modern Asset Creation
Almost 100% photogrammetry based. We have focused heavily on photorealism since the start of the project, doing our own scans of items such as household goods, furniture, small props, and weapons in our own custom-made high-end photogrammetry studio, and commissioning scanning work of real Soviet architecture all over Europe.
Since then, we have managed to achieve an almost 100% photogrammetry world, with the exception of occasional props and our Alien/Character clothing (We’re yet to find Aliens willing to let us scan their spaceships If you know any we’d appreciate their contact info). We believe this workflow can be incredibly efficient at producing spectacular assets and ultimately, a spectacular result.
Fresh Take On Survival Game Enemy
Aliens! Zombies are by far the most popular enemies in survival games, but we wanted to do something different and give ourselves an enemy that we can make much more emotional, horrifying, and challenging to fight, plus it gives us extra opportunities to branch into scavenging unique alien tech in the future, such as ripping the energy sword from the alien you killed for a few minutes of plasma battery-powered fun!
While we have avoided having our Alien foot soldier asset designed, created, and animated due to the cost it would require to create a quality result worthy of what we’re trying to do, we have had 4 ships created for the demo. A mothership that resides permanently in space, visible in the skybox, a destroyer-sized ship that similarly usually stays in space, a dropship that is visible in the first few moments of the demo, and a fighter drone visible twice later in the demo.
In the full game, we plan on developing a variety of alien-centric features including:
Alien incursion events.
Dropship insertion of Alien troops to respond to activity.
Alien hub/domes with unique time-warping effects scattered throughout the world.
A variety of drone enemies such as reconnaissance and fighter drones which locate and attack survivors.
Notoriety system where Aliens hunt down notorious Alien killing players.
A variety of Alien species all with unique gameplay mechanics and behaviours.
We have plans for a number of foot soldier-type aliens, ground vehicles, and a number of enslaved human enemies (think half-life head grab but with technology).
Ahnor (Elite Hunter)
Ahati (Footsoldier)
Arbiter(Elder leadership)
Ahati(Early face concept)
Mothership, Cruiser, Dropship, Attack/Scout ship (top, bottom left, bottom centre, bottom right)
Jackal(Scout)
Ahnor(Early Mask concept)
Innovative Character Progression And Talents System
Progression, in our style. Everyone loves a good RPG, and RPGs remain one of the most popular genres bar none. Despite this, many survival games are light or devoid of character progression elements, focusing instead on more detailed crafting and other progression systems. We focused very heavily on our custom character system which features a hybrid six-class system, plus an additional general tree.
You can pick any combination of talents from the six classes, and branch into as many trees as you want to create a truly unique character build, while additionally also having access to a general tree with separated points to be spent however you wish. This system truly gives you the possibility to have a unique talent combination while not making you feel constrained to one class archetype.
Unique UI Concept
We put significant thought into designing a genuinely simple and clean UI, that diverges from commonly seen grid-based systems for inventories. While these systems have their merits, we felt like they are too clunky and inefficient for what we’re going for. We designed and created the entire UI from scratch including a fully working inventory system complete with usable items, detailed medical reporting systems, and the talent system built in, all in one neat package. We also aim to add stat tracking and an in-depth gunsmith system into this window in the future.
Diegetic UI Elements
To further focus on the immersive and ultra-realism focus of Harbinger, we decided diegetic UI elements were the way to go. We believe these systems are far more satisfying and immersive to use in a survival game than a simple 2D overlay and allow the player to feel like they’re interacting more with the world and their character. Our current placeholder system features a map that can be panned/zoomed and a compass that shows your world rotation. We also plan to add a ‘notes’ system to the map where players can write down handwritten references of what and where they’ve discovered something, and these notes will be permanently stored on the map or paper scraps to the side until cleared.
We have acquired real objects from the Soviet period, including the map case shown below, an old tattered map, a curvimeter, and a genuine Bulgarian Adrianov Compass that has been scanned and put together as our new in-game Diegetic map.
Weapon Mastery System
Harbinger features a weapon customization system, which is fairly common now in FPS games, however, we added a much deeper system within it, a weapon mastery system. Every weapon in Harbinger will have a unique mini-skill tree that allows you to master and progress through your favorite weapons. These skills change a variety of things, from simple changes like faster reloads, to entirely reload animations and unique abilities such as the ability to fan your favorite revolver like a gunslinger with enough practice.
UE Chaos & Ballistics
Modern ballistics and gunplay, with a side of Chaos destruction! We knew that we had to make the gunplay genuinely satisfying for a game of this type to really shine, so we focused more on quality than quantity. Harbingers demo only features 2 guns, one bolt action and one semi/fully automatic rifle that both function fully with our weapon customization and progression systems and with highly polished audio and gunplay. We also coded a simple but performant penetration system to allow us to make the gunplay a little bit more skilled and deep. Finally, we made use of Unreal Engines' amazing Chaos system to create pre-destroyed meshes and also meshes that are destroyable. If you don't hit the person the first time, keep firing!
Bullet penetration demo
Chaos destruction demo
Full LIDAR Terrain Data
LIDAR-based terrain data. We have combined LIDAR data from around the real world to create a terrain that feels truly realistic while also saving us a ton of time. Our map is a 400km² area, of which the central 256km² is a playable area, all of which is created with real landscape from Earth, including roads, landscape layers, and height topology. Using LIDAR enabled us to only have to craft or modify specific areas of the landscape to suit our world-building while leaving the rest of the map prebuilt and already highly detailed by default. Ultimately this means that our entire landscape is ready and waiting for environment artists and world designers to begin work on, without having to spend significant time working on the landscape itself.
For our demo, we focused on approximately a 1x1km area and created a variety of different asset sets, including beach/lake, small urban town, farmland, and industrial, while also pinpointing exactly which landscape layers would be required for our entire world to be built.
Satellite View
LIDAR Height View
Full Map 20km x 20km view (Red is unplayable border 4km x 4xkm)
UE5 visibility collision view
Unique Camp Building
A completely fresh take on base building. Almost all survival games that feature base building, use a grid-based system to allow players to build structures that can be upgraded with stronger materials, locked, and filled with storage space. While this may be fun in some games, we felt it wasn’t right for us as it damages performance, can quite frankly be an eyesore on the landscape, and funnels players down a specific gameplay loop where bases and raiding become arguably the main feature of the game.
In Harbinger, we focused more on stealth and hidden camps rather than forts. It makes more sense for the story with humans hiding from their Alien hunters and requires more creativity and exploration to get the most from. Players can create camps and hide storage wherever they wish, but they can always theoretically be discovered and looted by other players. It is up to the player to decide how they want to design their base so that it is both useful and effective at remaining undetected.
Finding loot is fun, finding a locked castle isn't.
Why Is A Survival Game Of Harbingers Scale Viable?
It has been proven many times over the years just how passionate survival fans are, and just how popular the genre is as a whole, and the genre has a proven track record of success among successful indie and AA developments with dozens of titles selling enormous numbers of copies.
Games such as DayZ/H1Z1 also eventually spawned the Battle Royale subgenre of survival, which has led to some of the most successful AAA titles of all time such as Fortnite and PUBG.
We strongly believe that the entire survival game community is looking for a truly innovative and modern survival game and that they are willing to put their support behind a project they believe in. Unfortunately, the confidence of the community has been shaken several times over the years by survival games that have fallen short of expectations for a variety of reasons, and because of this, we have made it our goal to only approach the public once we are confident and proud of what we have built, and believe it is worthy of their backing and support. We are confident that the extra effort we are placing into the development before asking for their support will be reciprocated by strong backing from the community.
None of Harbinger's design goals are out of the realms of possibility or unrealistic, and while we are aware making games is a very challenging process, we aren’t targeting 10,000 concurrent player worlds or hordes of thousands of zombies as enemies. We are targeting up to 64 player worlds, with relatively simple enemies performance-wise, and with the majority of our core systems already outlined and developed past a prototype phase, we believe we will execute successfully with a talented and experienced team of developers.
Finally, we believe that demonstrating our clearly defined and innovative USPs would be an attractive proposition to any publishing body, and that we have the talent to prove we can deliver Harbinger at the quality demonstrated in our teaser trailer. Furthermore, many survival games such as Deadside have successfully launching in early access with a large portion of their final content not yet developed, proving how strong support for early stage and indie survival games can be when you demonstrate an attractive experience. We fully believe that with additional support and investment, we will be able to complete Harbinger and bring it to market.
How Would An Epic MegaGrant Impact Harbinger And Amplify Our Development Ability?
We’ve been working on Harbinger for almost 5 years, and with the exception of some freelanced help from some incredibly talented artists, the entire game has been built from the ground up by just two of us working full-time with no funding or salary and just a few thousand dollars in expenses. We’ve freelanced concept art, animation, rigging, custom photogrammetry, and a few other areas at minimal cost, but to expand we need support. Going forward, we aim to tackle the remaining core pillars of Harbinger and USP’s that we need to demonstrate to both publishers and the public with the aims of generating support for the project.
The overall impact of an Epic MegaGrant on our project would be drastic and scale up the speed of development significantly and allow us to hire critical art roles that we cannot tackle ourselves. Furthermore, it would allow us to branch out and work with other artists with the potential of working together post funding as full time team members. A grant would also enable both of us (the original two founders) to be more efficient as we will be able to focus more on what we excel at rather than having spread our efforts out over all areas of development.
Ultimately a grant would be a significant springboard to help us create a USP and core pillar complete vertical slice of Harbinger, a significant milestone in our development history. a 1x1km² build that demonstrates a performant, and functional multiplayer survival game experience complete with demonstrations of all of our USPs. This build would act as our vertical slice and would enable us to achieve strong funding from investors or publishers.
How Do We Intend To Grow And Give Back To The Wider Gaming And Epic Community?
You’ve probably heard this a million times before, but at the end of the day, we are indies and gamers ourselves. Yes, we’re trying to create something with huge financial potential from this because ultimately that enables us to sustain doing what we want into the future, but we don't have a complete corporation and business-focused outlook on what we’re trying to do. We plan on giving back to the community in as many ways as possible such as.
Contribute to Epic community podcasts, live videos, presentations, articles, and more. That would be an honor and a very proud moment for us all having learned and benefited so much from the Epic Ecosystem ourselves. The same goes for other publications such as 80lv and various other groups that put out fantastic educational content on video game development. We would also put out our own educational YouTube videos such as scanning tutorials and other engine related tutorials.
Contribute to Engine improvements by continuing to make reports, submit code, and share custom tools and editor utilities that we have created to drastically improve our efficiency. We have been doing this throughout the entire development, and are active in regularly reporting issues, suggesting solutions, or submitting code to the Github repository to help improve the engine for everyone.
Active involvement in helping others learn how to make games themselves. We are already active in a variety of groups on Discord, Reddit, and across various forums and groups, and will continue to help others and take part in discussions on these platforms. Additionally, we intend to do a blog on the game development which will serve as a valuable resource to any other future developers wanting to follow the journey we took throughout the entire development cycle.
Giving a platform to aspiring developers and modders to benefit financially, as well as make a name for themselves by sharing art created by our community. We want to work closely with the modding community and would offer modders opportunities to benefit from the development themselves. For example, running art competitions and events with the winners potentially being paid and credited if their art makes it in the game. We think this would be a valuable way to encourage artists and give them potentially a first step up into the industry as a whole. Alternatively, purchasing entire objects, such as guns/vehicles if they meet our standards and integrating them into the game is another possibility.
Going back to our high school and sharing our story and lessons. It has long been a personal goal of ours to both go back to our high school and give something back through assemblies and career guidance sessions. When making a game you realize just how much high school level mathematics and physics among other things are useful when coding and with one of the age-old questions from students to teachers having always been “Yeah but when am I ever going to need this in real life” we’d love to present our journey to students and provide an inspiring example of how subjects we studied have real-world applications in the developer community. We want to inspire the next generation of video game developers.
Attending gaming conventions and giving presentations as a successful indie. Working in live productions and film, I learned to love going to conventions such as CES, Siggraph, VRLA, etc to present publicly and do interviews. Getting to go out to GDC and other conventions and do presentations that would help others in the same shoes as us would be extremely gratifying.
Textbook case for a developer showing off UE5 and onwards flagship features such as Nanite, Lumen, Metahuman and PCG Framework.