Hey! My name is Gabriel — I’m a game programmer who transitioned to indie game development in 2022, and this is the story of how I made Jetpack Bubblegum, an anime-inspired, explosive arcade shooter, during the Unreal Fellowship: Games. I grew up playing arcade-style games on my Nintendo, so the arcade theme of the fellowship was perfect for me.
The Unreal Fellowship was both an intense and inspiring experience. I got to spend four weeks surrounded by incredibly talented game developers and artists, with guidance from incredibly dedicated instructors. The structure and support of the program gave me the perfect playground to go all-in on something wild and fun.
What I didn’t expect was how much this little prototype would grow on me. By the end of the fellowship, Jetpack Bubblegum wasn’t just a demo — it felt like the start of something real. So I’ve decided to keep going and turn it into a full commercial release. Here’s how it happened.
Finding The Idea
When it came to finding the idea, I like to decide on gameplay and visuals first. As a kid, I loved anime and over-the-top action games — the kind where everything explodes and it’s just unapologetic fun.
I looked back at the NES, and SNES games I grew up with. Flying shooters like the original Star Fox immediately stood out. While researching the on-rails genre, I found Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, which became my core gameplay reference.
For characters, I stumbled across these three characters from Ridho Mnf. They immediately reminded me of the Powerpuff Girls, and the seed of Jetpack Bubblegum was planted — a chaotic on-rails shooter where you fight enemies and explodes everything along the way.
I brought this idea to one of our fellowship breakrooms on the first week, these are rooms where you can ask for assistance from the instructors and other fellows. The brainstorming added a core element to the game’s theme: the comedy. And thus Jetpack Bubblegum hook was born:
Jetpack Bubblegum is an explosive on-rails shooter where three super-powered sisters fly, fight, and accidentally level half the city while trying to save a cat!
Prototyping Gameplay
Arcade games are all about instant dopamine and intuitive controls. So for Jetpack Bubblegum, there were two things I knew had to feel right from the start: the controls and the explosions.
Since the game needed to be playable on actual arcade machines at Unreal Fest, I had to design around limited controls, specifically, just one joystick. That meant finding a way to let players move and aim at the same time. I also didn’t want the character to always shoot forward like Space Harrier.
After a lot of iteration I arrived at a slightly unorthodox solution: the player actually controls just the crosshair, and the in-game character follows it, sticking to one of the sides. Even then, avoiding enemy shots felt overwhelming. So I added a single dodge button that makes the character quickly dash to the opposite side of the crosshair and gives the player a couple of frames of invincibility.
As for destruction — all the credit goes to Unreal Engine 5’s Chaos system. It made real-time destruction setup incredibly easy. The only challenge is that I went with the Tokyo City asset for the environment, which looks great, but all the buildings were hollow. In order to make destruction feel more realistic, I had to add floors and structural layers to all the buildings, and then convert them to work with UE5’s Chaos system.
Honestly, I wish I had spent more time on polishing the destruction, the pieces still feel too big and some buildings are still too hollow. It’s far from perfect, but it’s something I plan to improve for the final release.
Polish, Polish, Polish!
By the end of the second week, the gameplay was pretty much locked in. That gave me two full weeks to focus on polish — which I thought was a lot, but I still managed to submit my game at the very last minute! 
A lot of that time went into getting the environment visuals into shape. I manually created Level Instances for each of the buildings from the Tokyo City asset, then built an Editor Utility Blueprint to spawn buildings and roads along a spline. It’s not the prettiest setup, but it got the job done.
One thing I was especially happy to squeeze in was real-time dialogue between the sisters during combat, voiced in actual Japanese! It was a small addition, but I think it instantly gave the characters more personality and helped sell the comedy aspect of the game. I only had one voice set, so I played around with pitch and volume to give each sister a slightly different tone. The audio doesn’t always match the text, but I’m hoping to bring in real Japanese voice actors for the final game.
Final Thoughts
The Unreal Fellowship was such a special experience — four weeks of total immersion into game development with Unreal Engine, surrounded by incredibly creative fellows and genuinely dedicated instructors. It was intense, but also one of the most rewarding things I’ve done as a developer.
I went into the program with very little experience in Unreal Engine 5, and now I feel completely at home in it, and I’m genuiely impressed by how much creative tooling the engine provides. It helped me focus on gameplay and a big reason I was able to add so much to the game in just 4 weeks.
I’ve decided to keep developing Jetpack Bubblegum in Unreal 5 and plan to release it later this year. If you’d like to follow along, you can find me on Twitter and YouTube — I’ll be sharing my journey and in-depth devlogs there!