Kaiju
Destruction and escalation sandbox · UE 5.8 · 2026
Walk and you’re harmless. Sprint and the city comes down beam by beam, and every tonne you break brings a bigger army.
Role: designer and creative director: feel targets, escalation design, sign-off on every tuning pass. Built with: UE 5.8 on Epic’s City Sample, Chaos destruction, Mass AI, C++ and Blueprint; Claude Code. Timeline: Aug 13 – Sep 9, 2026. Status: showcase prototype.
| By the numbers
12.2×
Strain gap between walking and sprinting, from Strain = Base × Momentum²
360
Mass AI agents: 200 soldiers, 40 rooftop defenders, 120 civilians
510
Pieces in a 122 m structural-frame tower, vs 2,521 for a smaller pre-fractured one
9 ms
Median frame time while a tower collapses
| The design house
1. Momentum is the weapon
Strain = Base × Momentum². Squaring momentum is what makes walking harmless and sprinting apocalyptic.
2. Buildings are structural frames
My direction: “imagine a building under construction where you can still see the high-rise beams.” Columns and slabs fail in a way you can read.
3. Show the system
The escalation math was invisible, so the next feature was a readout, not more content: a tonnage counter, a threat tier and an escalation banner.
| Inside the design
The fun: escalation you cause
Every tonne you destroy raises the threat tier: infantry first, then a tank cordon, then jets. The army is a direct, readable response to how hard you play, so the player authors their own difficulty curve.
ESCALATION · MASS AI
Decision: no choreographed glass
The first glass collapse was a timed wave, and I rejected it: “choreographed and timed every time.” Now a pane breaks only when the beam next to it actually moves, so every collapse is different. 648 panes per building.
DESTRUCTION FEEL
Decision: feedback rules for the stomp
Weight (shake, shockwave, debris) fires on every stomp so the attack always reads. Hit stop fires only on kills, because a freeze with nothing on screen reads as a stutter. Camera shake scales with body count, up to 25 victims.
GAME FEEL
Frames, not solid blocks
Structural frames were readable and cheaper: 510 pieces for a 122 m tower. Honesty note: the reel takes lowered the escalation threshold so the army tiers arrive within a minute, and were captured at 1/5 speed and retimed. Every frame is a real game frame.
CHAOS · PERFORMANCE