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Most people assume a team made this, but it was made by one nerdy dude. Hi. To make [music] this happen, I needed hand-drawn environments, but I can't draw. I needed dozens of painted buildings, which I don't have time for,
One developer shares how he built a big, complex game solo using procedural art, system-driven gameplay, and optimized architecture.
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Key Takeaways
- Procedural generation and smart materials can replace hand-painting to create rich game environments efficiently.
- Reusing objects and system-driven architecture enable large-scale gameplay without performance loss.
- Building gameplay systems rather than scripted events allows emergent and dynamic player experiences.
- Using multi-core processing with DOTS significantly improves simulation capacity for many entities.
- A solo developer can create a complex, big-feeling game by focusing on automation and optimization.
What the video covers
- The game Project Tomorrow was created by a single developer over 15 months while balancing a day job and family.
- Procedural hand-drawn style textures and materials are generated using Substance Designer and Substance Painter without traditional painting or AI.
- The environment and buildings adapt automatically with smart materials and procedural generation, enabling seamless variation and detail.
- Gameplay systems drive the world’s healing and terraforming, creating emergent gameplay rather than scripted moments.
- Animations are dynamically generated to handle complex combat scenarios without traditional animation limitations.
- Enemies, bullets, and explosions are reused via object pooling to maintain high performance despite large numbers on screen.
- The game architecture uses DOTS (Data-Oriented Technology Stack) to leverage multiple CPU cores for massive simulation scale.
- The developer emphasizes creating systems and rules that generate content and gameplay rather than handcrafting every element.
- Project Tomorrow is a dystopian base-building survival game set on a poisoned Earth, focusing on restoring life.
- Wishlisting the game on Steam helps increase its visibility and support its development.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and project overview
- 00:38Automatic material adaptation and optimization
- 01:17Game story and setting: Project Tomorrow
- 01:54Personal background and motivation
- 02:33Procedural environment and texture generation
- 03:33Normal maps and visual detail without geometry
- 04:24Automated building textures and procedural leaves
- 05:35Dynamic world healing and data-driven environment
- 06:19System-driven player animations
- 07:02Gameplay systems and emergent mechanics
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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and I wanted thousands of enemies on the screen. I didn't use AI. [music] I couldn't hire a team.
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And no, I don't secretly have a publisher. [music] I'll show you how I generate seamless hand-drawn textures without being an artist.
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How my materials adapt automatically instead of being repainted, and how every bullet, explosion, and enemy gets reused so the game never slows down.
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15 months ago, my game landed on Steam's popular upcoming and did six figures in revenue. Then I disappeared.
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Since then, I've been building this between my day job and dad duty. It's a base building survival game with terraforming and crafting. Earth lies poisoned and abandoned 10,000 years after invasion. You awaken from stasis to defend a fragile foothold and slowly
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bring a dead world back to life so humanity can live here again. I call it Project Tomorrow.
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But wait, let's back up. Why Project Tomorrow? I've always been drawn to dystopian stories about broken worlds [music] that need healing. I love the Silo books. I've sunk countless hours into Fallout, and I think Wall-E is one of the greatest movies ever made. My
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5-year-old is obsessed with it right now, and rediscovering it with him [music] reminded me why these stories matter. There's something powerful about fighting for a future that isn't guaranteed. I'm also that kind of crazy person who believes in conspiracy
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theories like global warming is real and the planet might actually need our help. My first mobile game was called Hamster Power. It was about generating clean energy with hamsters and if players progressed far enough, I would plant a
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tree in real life. Players all over the world joined in. We planted more than 200 trees together. It didn't save the planet, but it did mean something to me because at the end of the day, that's what Project Tomorrow is all about. A
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world that's been broken and the belief that maybe if someone tries they can bring it [music] back. This is where I started. A barren desert, no vegetation, flat textures. The enemies could only move in straight lines and they [music]
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couldn't attack. Everything you see now had to be built from scratch. Not by hand, but by building systems that could do the work for me. If I had to paint every surface in this game by hand, I'd still be painting every cliff, every
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rock, every terrain tile. [music] That doesn't scale. So instead of painting assets, I built a system that paints them for me. Not with AI, with rules. In Substance Designer, I can build materials out of math, noise patterns, tile samplers, and blends combined in
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ways that I can adjust at any time. Change one value, and the entire surface updates. This file is called a graph.
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And one graph can generate endless variations. So instead of creating hundreds of hand-painted textures, I created a recipe that paints them for me. But I can get so much [music] more than color out of these graphs. This
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floor is completely flat. No extra geometry, just a simple square. But watch what happens when I enable this.
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All of that detail. It isn't real geometry. With this graph, I can generate something called a normal map.
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A normal map is just a texture. It doesn't add polygons. It adds lighting information. So, the surfaces in the game can look complex without actually being complex. I get the visual detail of sculpted assets without sculpting anything. Cliffs instantly look rockier.
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Grass shows individual [music] blades on what is actually flat geometry. It tiles perfectly. It blends perfectly. And I can regenerate it whenever I need to.
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Next, I'll show you how I automated building textures. But first, a quick personal request. I've just made the Project Tomorrow Steam page public today. If you want to support the project, wish listing helps more than anything else. It tells Steam this game
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is worth showing to more people. It takes one click and it makes a huge difference. There's a link in the description. Now, let's talk about how I painted dozens of buildings with a system. Buildings are the same idea as
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the environment. Instead of hand painting every asset, I use smart materials within Substance Painter that react to the geometry. Edgewear appears instantly. Dirt collects in crevices.
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Color variation happens automatically. I don't paint assets. The material does the work so that I don't have to. One last detail. It's subtle, but it's cool.
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Even the leaves are procedural. In Blender, I place simple spheres on a trunk. Then geometry nodes scatter leaf card meshes across them. Each card is six-sided, so the leaves hold up from any angle. Add a texture and the tree
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builds itself. [music] Because the environment is driven by data, it can react in real time. The art responds to gameplay, not the other way around. You aren't just building defenses and terraforming [music] machines. You're rebuilding the planet.
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The more you build, the more the world heals. Dead ground comes back to life.
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Vegetation returns. [music] Water becomes clean again. I didn't create every version of this planet. I created a set of rules to generate it automatically. That's how one developer builds [music] a world that feels like a team made it.
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Even the player animations are system-driven. When the enemies surround you, the player has to snap between targets. Traditional animations break here. They look stiff or delayed. So, instead of rotating the body first, I rotate the weapon and let the body react
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to it. Getting the math right took way too long. Looks like a shooting chicken.
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Okay, so the gun's going through her body and the [music] hand is dancing. I don't even know what this is. The stuff of nightmares.
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The payoff is huge. Now, the animations generate themselves for every [music] weapon. Next comes the fun stuff. Enemies, bullets, and explosions. And just like the environment, they're driven by systems. Because the game isn't scripted, it's simulated.
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Water keeps you alive, but water also grows your food. Terraforming unlocks stronger defenses, but you need defenses to protect your terraforming.
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Every system pushes against [music] another. The game responds to your decisions and gameplay emerges from that tension. Which means I'm not building every moment. I'm building systems and letting them create the gameplay themselves. Because textures don't make a game feel big. It feels big because of
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activity. Bullets, explosions, enemies constantly appearing and disappearing. But under the hood, that's a problem.
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Every time something spawns and gets destroyed, the hardware has to allocate memory and then free it. Do that enough times and performance starts to fall apart.
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So instead of creating and destroying objects, I reuse them. This bullet isn't new, it's recycled. When a bullet hits something, it doesn't get destroyed. It goes back to a pool ready to be used again. Enemies work the same way. They
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aren't constantly created and destroyed. They're reused. That means the game isn't wasting time managing memory. It's spending time running the simulation.
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This lets the game handle far more activity without slowing down. But reuse alone isn't enough. To reach this scale, the entire game has to be built differently. This is where architecture takes over. Normally, each enemy in a game runs on its own logic. That works
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until you do it thousands of times, then the overhead becomes a bottleneck. So, instead of building the game around individual enemies, I built it around shared systems. If you're techy, this is called [music] DOTS. If not, here's the
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simple version. Computers have multiple cores. Even mobile hardware like the Steam Deck has four [music] cores. Most games only use one at a time, but with this design, I can use all of them simultaneously. That means more enemies,
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more bullets, more chaos. Movement is one sys
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defenses. I also use burst, which makes it even faster. It translates my code into highly optimized machine instructions, letting all the cores process thousands of enemies at [music] the same time. So, I'm not simulating a few enemies. I'm
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simulating an army. I didn't build this by working harder. I built it by building smarter systems. Building a big game isn't about doing everything. It's about building the right systems so the game can build itself. That's Project Tomorrow. If you want to see how far one
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developer can push this idea, wish list Project Tomorrow on Steam, because this is only the beginning.
Topics:game developmentprocedural generationSubstance DesignerSubstance Painterobject poolingDOTSbase building gamesurvival gameindie gameProject Tomorrow
