Jeffy Zachariah, a solo developer with 15+ years of game industry experience, shares the creation process behind The Void, a survival horror FPS inspired by the movie The Mist. After years of failed publisher pitches, he decided to go solo and build a deliberately scoped game. The Void places players in a fog-surrounded swamp with one weapon, limited ammo, one life, and no health regeneration. Enemies have randomized spawns and weak spots, and the game dynamically adjusts resource drops based on player behavior. Built in Unreal Engine 5.6 using Nanite, Lumen, and VSM shadows, the project started around Christmas 2025. The core lesson: define scope ruthlessly, finish the game, and don't wait for publisher approval.
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IntroductionQuestions this post answers
What Unreal Engine 5 features were used to build a survival horror FPS as a solo developer?
The Void uses Unreal Engine 5.6 with Nanite, Lumen, and VSM shadows for its visuals. The first-person rendering system was in beta at the time, MegaLights had just launched in experimental mode, and plugins for fog scatter and async loading were also used. Every setting was manually fine-tuned to eliminate stutters and hitches that would otherwise break the FPS experience. Solo developers shipping their first UE5 game track engine feature readiness like this on daily.dev.
How do I prevent scope creep when developing my first indie game solo?
Set a hard feature ceiling before writing a single line of code and commit to never exceeding it — only scaling down if needed. For The Void, that meant one weapon, limited ammo, explosives, a shield, and a life system, with no upgrades or multiple weapons. The motto was 'make the game fun with as little as possible.' Most first projects fail not because the idea was bad but because scope grew until shipping became impossible. Developers navigating their first solo release find scope discipline discussions like this on daily.dev.