Erik Hervall makes games.

An infinite open-world sandbox MMO, built in Unreal Engine 5.

DreamWorld set out to be one enormous shared world: an MMORPG with no edge to the map, where building, inventory and world interaction all had to hold up across a networked sandbox.

I worked on it as a gameplay developer. The project has since gone into hibernation, but it's where I learned the most about what it takes to build a game at that scale.

DreamWorld on Steam ↗

XP gained

• Gameplay systems Building, world interactions, inventory and asset placement in a large multiplayer C++ and Blueprint codebase.
• UI and onboarding Menus, tutorial flow and player feedback built with Widget Blueprints.
• Profiling Hunting GPU and CPU bottlenecks with Unreal's tools and RenderDoc.
• Scalability Tuning cvars, shadows, LODs, Nanite, foliage and texture streaming.
• Huge worlds World generation and streaming for an open world with no fixed size.
• Listening to players Using playtests and community feedback to decide what to fix next.

I'm Erik. I make games, mostly in Unreal Engine 5.

I like gameplay systems, multiplayer problems and performance work, and I like making things that are fun to mess around with. This site is one of them.

Before games I built full-stack web apps: Flask and Express back ends, React front ends, PostgreSQL, and a React Native mobile app. That background still comes in handy for tools, UI and data.

Loadout

• Unreal Engine 5
• C++
• Blueprints
• Multiplayer
• Gameplay systems
• Widget Blueprints
• Profiling
• RenderDoc
• Optimization

Earlier save file

• Python
• Flask
• JavaScript
• React
• Express
• PostgreSQL
• React Native