Your shields are your weapons. Real-time multiplayer space combat where every trigger pull costs you the defenses that keep you alive.
In the early 2000s, Sony Online Entertainment released Cosmic Rift—a top-down spaceship combat game where a single energy resource powered both your shields and your weapons. Every shot you fired weakened your defenses. That tension—spend energy to kill, or save it to survive—produced some of the most compelling competitive gameplay I've experienced. The servers shut down years ago, and nothing replaced it.
Astral Rift is my attempt to bring that feeling back. Same core tension, modern engine, new mechanics. Eight ships across five factions, five game modes, neural network AI, and a world built around the ruins of five lost civilizations. See the full product page →
Built entirely in C++ on Unreal Engine 5.7—no Blueprints, no visual scripting.
Neural network bots train via PPO reinforcement learning in a pure JAX physics simulation across 4,096 parallel environments. The best model achieves 99.4% win rate in 6-ship FFA after 44 training phases. Ship-specific models learn unique abilities—FocusFire (damage boost), MineDash (dash + area denial), ShrapnelBurst (directional cone)—each trained from scratch in the sim and deployed via ONNX. Key discoveries: KOTH zone reward acts as an engagement regularizer (producing better FFA fighters than FFA training), and self-play only works against clearly weaker opponents. Deep dive →
Black holes with Schwarzschild-inspired spacetime distortion and Keplerian particle orbits. Nebula clouds with Kolmogorov turbulence. Procedural asteroid surfaces with Voronoi crater patterns.
Projectile object pooling with zero combat allocations, centralized actor registry, single-pass HUD rendering, tick budgeting, and material instance reuse—designed for 50+ concurrent players.
FFA Deathmatch, KOTH, CTF, and Duel match flow, mode-specific ability loadout system, per-mode item spawn zones, team assignment, kill feed, HUD with minimap and flag status, ship selection with sprite previews, key rebinding, bounty scoring, data-driven map editor with procedural layout generation, auto-follow spectator camera, and full multiplayer networking with client-side prediction, server reconciliation, lag compensation (server-side rewind), and entity interpolation. 375+ total tests: 275 headless behavior tests, 49 multi-process networking tests (including 3-client stress and latency simulation), 86 visual tests, and 31 JAX sim cross-checks. Networking deep dive →
My background is a decade of backend engineering in Go and Python—distributed systems, internal platforms, CI/CD at Block (formerly Square). This project proved that systems thinking transfers directly: the same principles that make a distributed backend resilient make a game codebase maintainable.
Astral Rift is in active development. If you'd like to know when it's playable, send me an email and I'll add you to the list.