Making Plugins for Game Engines as a Business
summary
A commercial voxel toolkit called Voxel Plugin targets Unreal Engine and implements runtime-editable, procedural landscapes, caves, planets and foliage; the team is 4 full-time engineers and development uses C++ (with some C# for build scripts), GitHub Actions CI that packages editor builds, and the marketplace policy limits supported engine releases. Memory scales with edits — a 10 km × 10 km editable world can use ~1 GB if edited everywhere — UE5 migration reportedly takes minutes, and marketing runs via Twitter/Discord/Reddit.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Plugin development business intro
- 1:20Why make game engine plugins
- 2:23Voxel Plugin idea origin
- 3:25Team for plugin dev
- 5:10Plugins to game dev jobs
- 6:35Balancing engineering and art
- 7:19Measuring plugin resource impact
- 9:22Memory management in voxel plugins
- 10:25Hardware for plugin devs
- 11:27CI/CD for Unreal plugins
- 12:51Proprietary SDKs in plugins
- 13:12Release cycle for plugins
- 14:35Unreal version compatibility
- 17:03Skills for plugin dev
- 18:05Improving Unreal for plugins
- 19:07Plugin projects in games
- 20:29Plugins vs games first
- 21:54Learning curve for plugins
- 23:38Marketing plugins
- 26:45Who makes game engine plugins
- 27:47Popular Unreal plugins
- 29:31Plugins merging into engines
- 31:15Migrating plugins to Unreal Engine 5
- 31:56Q&A
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