# \[WIP\] Atlantic Bay - command a city defence against a GPU bug horde (Epic AI MegaJam 2026, solo + AI agents) **URL:** \ **Category:** Game Development\ **Tags:** unreal-engine\ **Created:** [November 13, 2026, 9:50pm UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/wip-atlantic-bay-command-a-city-defence-against-a-gpu-bug-horde-epic-ai-megajam-2026-solo-ai-agents/2855483 "2026-11-13T21:50:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![FaxLab3D](https://d1ap1mz92jnks1.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/forums.unrealengine.com/faxlab3d/32/1113136_2.png) [@FaxLab3D](https://forums.unrealengine.com/u/FaxLab3D)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2026, 9:50pm UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/wip-atlantic-bay-command-a-city-defence-against-a-gpu-bug-horde-epic-ai-megajam-2026-solo-ai-agents/2855483/1 "2026-11-13T21:50:45Z")
![still-drone-over-horde](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/2/1/7/217ec6422d4946d16fbdff03f66a72dc1aa764f4.webp) Hello all. This is my work-in-progress entry for the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, theme “Director’s Cut”. One person, four days, Unreal Engine 5.9 Preview. Two days in. **The idea** Rifts open over the city of Atlantic Bay and pour alien bugs into the streets. You are an Alliance officer, and the game is your dashboard: a satellite map, a wallet, and machines that fight on their own until you jump into one of them. Every shell costs money, every kill pays a little back. Close all three rifts before the landmarks fall. Once per mission, when it is all going wrong: Director’s Cut. Three minutes in which everything is free. **What works today** - A satellite command map with three “enhance” zoom steps - A light buggy, a drone and a gunship seat you can jump into at any time - Up to 40,000 bugs alive at once, each a Niagara GPU particle with its own health - A horde that follows a flow field solved again while you play, so it routes round buildings and spreads into the next street when one is packed - Bugs that are solid: they jump on the buggy, hold on, chew the hull and add real mass where they sit - Rifts with a budget of bugs: kill enough and a rift runs dry **How the dev has gone so far** I am a realtime and shader artist, not a programmer. I describe what I want, play every build and judge by eye. AI coding agents write the C++, the Niagara simulation and the editor scripts, driving the editor through the MCP server that ships with 5.9. One agent builds, a different model reviews the change once, then one round of fixes. Day 1: an empty project in the morning, a million bugs in a block city by 09:38 (a packaged test scene held one million at about 18 ms a frame on an RTX 4060 Ti at 1080p; the full game is heavier and I am not quoting a frame rate for it). By the afternoon there was a whole round with money, bases and Director’s Cut. Then I played it and it was not the game. The gunship felt right, the command panel did not, and we rewrote the concept around the dashboard that same afternoon. Day 2: the round moved onto a city built from real street data, the map became a satellite view, bugs learned to ride vehicles, and the horde learned to flow like a river instead of balling up on corners. What went wrong, because it did: - Two packaged builds shipped without the mission in them. A stale editor module quietly dropped every asset of a new class from the cook. - The game lost the graphics device six seconds after the first bugs spawned. Twenty test runs narrowed it to about 140 same-frame scratch values stored as particle attributes. Moving them to the Transient namespace fixed it. I still do not know the engine-side reason; if anyone does, I would like to hear it. - The first “bug river” could not work: a packed corner added 50 m of cost, going round the block costs 200 m. The reviewing model caught it by doing the sum. The art is still rough: the bugs are a pink test model and most of the look pass is ahead of me. Clip of the command map: [FAXCORP on X: "Command map for the jam game. Scroll wheel is labelled "enhance". #UnrealEngine #gamejam" / X](https://x.com/faxcorpdev/status/2121358299950158167) A full dev log goes up with the entry on Sunday. Questions and feedback welcome, especially on the swarm. ![still-satellite-map-horde](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/7/1/7/7170390223be097a690ccfe0db1a0c26b7f757d2.jpeg) ![still-bug-river-night-city](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/0/9/8/0983ad3bacd4a9c42b07d3683a3281aac8bcb5ab.jpeg) ![still-day1-one-million-bugs](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/7/d/0/7d00ed204c17b142ddecd67182ea4d3bddb7ec94.jpeg)