Epic MegaGrants Submission — 2026
Mars is dead. You are the last pilot with a working suit — and flight, hover and wingsuit glide are how you cross it, and how you fight it.
Epic MegaGrants — Application Materials
A playable vertical slice exists today in Unreal Engine 5.8, built and self-funded by a team of fewer than five in Olongapo, Philippines. Everything below is implemented, not proposed.
Only Hope is a third-person action-adventure set on a Mars whose colonization effort has already collapsed. You play the last pilot with a working suit, moving across an abandoned planetary surface to find out what happened to the colony — and what is still living in it.
Most Mars games are walking simulators with a red filter. Our answer to a vast, empty world is to make crossing it the pleasure rather than the tax.
The planet is the antagonist before anything else is.
Pillar 01
Powered flight, stationary hover, and an unpowered wingsuit glide with real lift and drag. Air tunnel rings grant boost and turn open distance into a readable, skill-expressive route.
Movement is not how you reach the content — it is the content.
Pillar 02
Encounters are built around large Martian creatures rather than volume. The slice ships the Martian Alpha — three attack phases, a full health state machine and a death sequence — a boss that cannot be fought from the ground.
The flight and glide systems are the combat systems.
Pillar 03
A holographic scanning layer reads the colony's history off the environment — research logs and records recovered from the sites where they were left.
The story is assembled by the player, not delivered in cutscenes.
Unreal's Mover 2.0 framework ships with no aerial locomotion at all. Each of these is implemented as a proper Mover movement mode, with the transition logic that makes them interoperate cleanly with ground movement.
Powered Flight
Full directional control with thrust and fuel response.
Hover
Stationary hold for combat repositioning and precision approach.
Wingsuit Glide
Models lift and drag, not a fall-speed clamp — trade altitude for speed and hold a line across kilometres.
Air Tunnel Rings
Placed boost gates that give an empty planet a shape to move through, without clutter.
In-engine — Unreal Engine 5.8.
A playable vertical slice in Unreal Engine 5.8. Implemented and working, entirely self-funded, with no outside funding secured.
Custom locomotion stack on Mover 2.0
Flight, hover, wingsuit glide, ground locomotion, slide and crouch — with correct transitions between every mode.
Mover-to-GASP animation bridge
Including the chooser-driven pose selection the Game Animation Sample Project depends on.
Large-scale Martian landscape
Produced by our own offline generation pipeline and validated against walkability metrics rather than by eye.
The Martian Alpha boss encounter
Three attacks, a health state machine and a death sequence, shipping in the slice.
Air tunnel traversal & holographic discovery
Both playable in the vertical slice.
Lumen, Nanite and Chaos physics
Global illumination and reflections, Nanite geometry and Chaos physics throughout.
Problem 01
Unreal's Mover framework ships with no flight, hover, or glide movement mode. We implemented all three as first-class Mover modes, with the transition logic that makes them interoperate cleanly with ground locomotion.
To our knowledge there is no other public implementation of aerial movement on Mover.
Problem 02
GASP's chooser-driven animation stack assumes the Character Movement Component. Running it on a Mover backend means reconstructing the character-state snapshot the AnimGraph reads and matching chooser context classes exactly.
Undocumented — and the exact wall that stops most developers who try to combine the two.
Our Martian landscape is not hand-sculpted. It is generated offline from a written specification and validated automatically against walkability metrics. Terrain changes are made by editing the spec and rebuilding — not by manual sculpting passes. That is what makes a planet-scale surface maintainable by a team of three.
01
Spec
Terrain written as a text specification.
02
Build
Deterministic offline generation.
03
Validate
Automated walkability metrics.
04
Iterate
Edit the spec, rebuild, re-measure.
Released under a permissive license and funded as a deliverable — not as a promise we make room for later.
A standalone drop-in reference containing our flight, hover and glide Mover modes plus the Mover-to-GASP animation bridge.
The spec-driven offline landscape generation and walkability validation system, open sourced.
Published breakdowns of both systems, covering the failure modes we hit so others do not have to rediscover them.
Plus open technical sessions on this material for Philippine university game development programs and local developer meetups, and our production documentation published openly.
The Philippine games industry is substantial and growing — and overwhelmingly outsourcing and co-development for foreign studios. Very few Filipino teams direct their own original titles. Fewer still attempt one at this level of technical ambition on Unreal Engine.
A funded, shipped, technically serious Filipino-owned Unreal title changes what the next team here believes is available to them. That is why we build publicly and release our technology openly.
<5
Person studio
$0
Outside funding
3
Systems to open source
18
Months to ship
The vertical slice proves the game works. It does not prove we can build eight hours of it. This funds the transition from pre-production to full production: an 18-month runway for a three-person core team in the Philippines, plus the specialist work we cannot staff internally.
Requesting
$111,000
Band: $100,000 – $150,000
18-month runway · 3 full-time Filipino developers
The largest line is people, which is the point: this converts a self-funded side effort into three salaried full-time Filipino game developers working on an original Unreal Engine title for eighteen months.
Month 1–4
Hire the core three. Harden the locomotion stack. Lock the combat verb set and the enemy framework.
Month 5–10
Full Martian expanse build-out. Two additional bosses. Complete the discovery and narrative layer.
Month 11–15
Score, sound design and voice integrated. Localization. Full playthrough tuning.
Month 16–18
Performance, certification, launch. Open-source release and technical write-ups published.
Milestone gate at each phase boundary: a playable build, not a document.
We are asking Epic to fund the production of something that already runs.
