Author

Yaroslav Lazarev

113 posts

2026-04-28

Aarkun | Devlog | Indie MMORPG | April Update — Site Launch & Patreon

This update is a shorter one and steps away from systems and code for a moment. April brought two things I’ve been planning for a while: Aarkun finally has its…
2026-04-28

Aarkun | Devlog #92 | Indie MMORPG | March Update (Part 3)

Another small update, in early April we also created the primary site for Aarkun! About | Aarkun Welcome to Part 3 of the March update. After the crafting demo and…
2026-04-28

Aarkun | Devlog #91 | Indie MMORPG | March Update (Part 2)

Welcome back to another Aarkun dev log. In Part 2 of the March update, we’re diving into three big areas of progress: the new smithing and crafting system, a proper…
2026-04-28

Aarkun | Devlog #90 | Indie MMORPG | March Update (Part 1)

This update covers the current state of the project, what’s been worked on over the past couple of months, and some of the systems that are starting to come together.…
2026-04-28

UE5 MMO Devlog 89 – Aarkun project – Environment and story update

This update focuses on the environment and narrative progression of the game, specifically the development of the starter island where players begin their journey. Over the past few months, a…
2026-04-28

UE5 MMO Devlog 88 – Finding developers for your UE project

In this update, I wanted to step away from pure gameplay systems and talk about something equally important when building a project: finding developers. Over the past month or two,…
2026-04-28

UE5 MMO Devlog 87 – Aarkun project – Faming weapon imbue

In this update, I’ve been working on introducing a new system for weapon imbues. This is one of several features developed over the past month, and it lays the groundwork…
2026-04-28

UE5 MMO Devlog 86 – Refactoring character to C++

Hey everyone — it’s been about a month since the last update, and quite a lot has changed behind the scenes. This post focuses on one of the biggest technical…
2025-06-20

UE5 MMO Devlog 85: Potions overview

In this update I introduce Potions into the game. These are new ‘Consumable’ Item types. Potions required several considerations: First question is regarding Potion definitions. For this, I slightly adjusted…
2025-06-20

UE MMO Devlog 84: Introducing new fighter/mage defensive rages

Over the past few weeks, I was working on removing the kafka dependency from the custom server solution. Instead I am starting to use GRPC to communicate between nodes. This…
2025-06-06

UE MMO Devlog 83: Introducing better AoE handling

This is another progress update, where I added some new AoE skills and the ability to select the location for the AoE effect. In order to achieve this, I used…
2025-04-25

UE5 Devlog 82: How to toggle selected target actor using tab by distance

In the previous post, we created an event listener which will allow us to select the target by clicking the target actor. https://unreal-mmo-dev.com/2025/04/25/ue5-devlog-81-how-to-add-left-right-event-click-listener-on-actor/ Now, I want to create a new…
2025-04-25

UE5 Devlog 81: How to add left / right event click listener on actor

You may have noticed that you don’t see native events on your actors to detect left/right click event listeners. You could consider potentially adding something like a Cylinder mesh around…
2025-04-24

UE5 Devlog 80: Introducing Party system to our MMO game

This is a short progress update video where I showcase a new Party feature for the MMO game in development. The party system will allow users to form a party…
2025-04-16

UE5 Devlog 79: Introducing Chat system to our MMO Game

This is another update in our MMO development journey. Now, I’ve added new functionality to enable players to communicate to each other using chat. For now its a very basic…
2025-04-15

EU5 Devlog 78: Added new Fighter skills and a blink to the mmo game

The game is progressing smoothly and I’ve started to expand the list of skills available to the players. I’ve now got a relatively scalable skills framework set up and its…
2025-04-15

UE5 Devlog 77: How the Talent System UI was made

In this video we took a bit a look at all of the components and widgets which were required to create the talent system in the mmo style game. This…
2025-03-12

Devlog 76: Talent system code deep dive

In this video, I go through some of the code supporting the talent system which is integrated with the Unreal Engine MMO game that I’m developing. The server is written…
2025-03-12

Devlog 75 Progress update: Talent system intro

The progress update is covered in the video below. It is introducing a new talent system into the MMO game. The talent system allows for passive and augment type talents…
2025-02-16

Devlog 74: How to integrate ALS with custom character mesh

In this post, we explore how we can integrate a complex custom mesh with ALS. The first part is documented in this video: The video is adding ALS into your…
2024-10-27

Log69: How to make a hovering widget display near your mouse in UE5

In this short post we’ll look at how we can make a widget pop up near the mouse and follow it. This use-case is for a widget to display information…
2024-10-22

DevLog68: Introduce Status to our game – how to handle respawn

Part of our game, we introduced a lot of functionality now, including combat system and character stats. The post on character stats can be found here. This post will focus…
2024-10-20

Log67: Getting modular item set for my character in UE5

A little while ago, I introduced a system/framework which allowed me to model items in my game. This would be a pre-requisite to this post, though I cover some aspects…
2024-10-07

66. Push your UE project to a remote repository, for FREE!

In this post, we look at pushing our UE project to a remote repository for free. Unreal engine projects are large. Given their size, many platforms such as Github will…
2024-09-25

65. Deploying a custom java server to the cloud!

In this post we explore how Terraform was used to deploy the application to the cloud. The cloud of choice was Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb This is mainly because I will be…
2024-09-02

Devlog 64: How to add drag and drop to inventory in UE

Handling inventory is a relatively complicated topic. It’s been covered in multiple posts and here are some of them: In this post, we will be covering how I added drag…
2024-08-25

Devlog 63: How I made a persistable action bar in UE5

I’ve previously made an action bar for the game, which was covered in: Now I want to make the action bar persist the skills even after closing the game. This…
2024-08-02

Devlog 62: How I added XP and Level ups in our MMO-RPG style game with UE and Java

In this post, I extend our stats system to support XP and Level ups for our classes. This is a fairly high level overview of how it was achieved, so…
2024-07-24

Devlog 61: Adding better damage visuals to our UE game

In this post I’ve started to add some better damage visuals in my game. After checking several assets that can help with this in the UE Marketplace, I decided to…
2024-06-27

Devlog 60: How to handle MMO style motion with UE and custom server over UDP

In this post, I show how I used UDP to handle motion updates from my game running in Unreal Engine 5. The UDP updates will be going to a custom…
2024-06-20

Devlog 59: UDP with free Object Deliverer plugin in UE

In this post, we look at simple integration of Object Deliverer for UDP connectivity. This will be used to handle motion updates over UDP between UE and java server. This…
2024-06-10

Devlog 58: How to add the new Motion Matching to our UE5 project

We’ve previously looked at how to create a simple animation blueprint for actors in our project. In this post, we will look at how to leverage the new motion matching…
2024-05-05

DevLog 57: How to create UE Dedicated server with Azure PlayFab GSDK

This post will focus on integrating Microsoft Azure PlayFab GSDK with Unreal Engine. In the previous post, we compiled UE from source, which is a pre-requisite to this step. So…
2024-04-22

DevLog 56: How to build UE from source

In this post we explore how to build UE from source. You may want to do this for several reasons, but the main one is often to make a build…
2024-03-17

DevLog 55: Adding new skills to our MMO game in UE

In the previous two posts, I created the action bar and enabled drag and drop on it: Now I will start to actually create a skill implementation for the game,…
2024-02-06

54. How to give your Action Bar Drag & Drop in UE5

This is part 2 of making the great action bar in Unreal Engine, the first part can be found here. In this post, we will be extending the widgets we…
2024-02-03

53. How to make a great Action Bar in UE5

There are two parts to making this action bar and this is part 1. Next one is adding drag and drop functionality to the skill/action bar. In this post we…
2024-01-02

52. How to add basic MMO-style monster AI in UE

In this post, we will be looking to add very basic monster AI to our game. In the recent posts, we created basic combat implementation using our custom Java server…
2023-11-30

51. How To Create Animation Blueprint In UE5

In the previous two posts, we were creating our combat system for our game. Now, I’d like to create some better mobs that we can have combat with. What will…
2023-11-18

50. How To Begin Basic MMORPG Combat Validation With UE

In the previous post, we’ve introduced a very basic combat implementation that’s running between Unreal Engine and Java, you can find it here. As usual, the Java Micronaut server code…
2023-10-26

49. How to begin basic MMORPG combat implementation with UE

In this post we explore how to begin a very basic combat implementation for our MMO in Unreal Engine. Note that we will not implement even the basic validations such…
2023-09-03

48. How to modify your character mesh on item equips in Unreal Engine

In this post we’re extending our inventory and our items equip system. The equip system was implemented in part 46. Please note that this is effectively still work in progress,…
2023-08-01

47. How to make draggable widgets in UE5

In this post, we explore how to make draggable widgets in UE. In particular, I’d like to make a generic draggable window-type widget. See the video demo for example widgets…
2023-07-21

46 – How to integrate equipping items and stats system in UE using Websockets

In the previous post we briefly introduced the Stats system and how we will equip items using our Java server. In this post we will explore how to integrate that…
2023-07-19

45. How to handle RPG Stats system and equipping items in Java

In the previous posts, we created and modified our inventory system in Java Micronaut to be reactive and use websockets. The basic inventory demo was shown here. Inventory system was…
2023-06-29

44. How to integrate dynamic MMO inventory with your Unreal Engine

I’ve recently made some changes to the custom MMO server to support dynamic inventory. The Java Micronaut server code that’s used can be found here on GitHub. The video going…
2023-05-15

43. How to spawn and control mobs using Unreal Engine for MMO

This post is part of the journey of making MMO server using Unreal Engine and our Micronaut java server. Here are some of the linked posts. Ok so we’re at a…
2023-05-14

42. How to make smooth motion for your actors in UE

In this post we will explore how to handle smooth updates for your actors in Unreal Engine. These actors could be players or mobs. Essentially what we will achieve is…
2023-05-14

41. How to turn your Unreal Engine to MMO using custom server and Websockets

In this post we continue the journey of making MMO server using Unreal Engine and our Micronaut java server. This is the continuation of these posts: This post specifically focuses…
2023-05-11

40. How to make a good backend for your MMO game and Unreal Engine

This is the first part of how to make effective comms between Unreal Engine and a custom server. The posts in this series can be found here: The server code…
2023-05-10

39. How to synchronize motion effectively with UE and custom server

Over the next few posts, we will look at how to (more effectively) synchronize players motion between a custom server (Java Micronaut in our case) and Unreal Engine client. Here…
2023-04-18

38. How to easily compile your Plugin with UE – EasyKafka example

This is a short post on how to compile your plugin code against another version of Unreal Engine. At times, when you upgrade your UE version, you may find that…
2023-04-17

37. How to connect your Java Micronaut/SpringBoot with Kafka SASL

Part of the MMO journey, we need to make sure that we use scalable web systems. One thing we can do, is make our server event driven. Concept is to…
2023-03-30

36. How to use the Universal Camera Plugin in Unreal Engine

In this post we will explore how to use the universal camera plugin in Unreal Engine. In particular, we will be integrating it with our Top Down / Third person…
2023-02-01

35. How to create character with PlayFab and Unreal Engine

In this post, we’re going to create and fetch the characters for the logged in user. This is extension of previous post which integrated with PlayFab to Login and Register.…
2023-01-29

34. How to integrate PlayFab with UE for Login/Register

In this post we will look into integrating PlayFab login and create blueprints. We will focus specifically on blueprint logic rather than the design. This is effectively equivalent to OWS…
2023-01-23

33. How to create animated character in widget using Unreal Engine

In this post I will be extending my inventory design that I created in these posts: The goal will be to replace the mannequin from the character sheet with the…
2023-01-14

32. How to integrate OWS and UE to make character creation

In this post I will be looking to create a new character with OWS – I will be using the template for UE5.1. This is extension to previous post which…
2023-01-06

31. How to integrate Unreal Engine 5 with OWS – Login/Register example

This post is about integrating with OWS project. It assumes you already configured the OWS starter project that can be found here: https://www.openworldserver.com/getting-started/ue5.html Furthermore, you can find extension to this,…
2023-01-02

30. UE: How to handle zoom and rotate using camera properties

In this post we’re going to cover some more zoom and rotate options, this time without the use of a spring arm. Here are some alternatives: If you’re interested in…
2022-12-26

29. UE: How to rotate and zoom using spring arm

In this post we’re going to be handling camera zoom and camera rotation around an object using spring arm component connected to camera. There’s few other techniques for handling them,…
2022-11-24

28. UE MMO – how to synchronize players appearance

In the previous post we’ve looked at synchronizing the nearby players motion on our client. This means that we could see the nearby players move about as we expect, however…
2022-11-14

27. UE MMO – How to display nearby players

In this post we’re going to be using the content from previous post, where we synchronize the current character motion, and render the nearby players motion. There’s a lot of…
2022-10-26

26. UE MMORPG: how to synchronize motion with a custom server

In this post we’re going to be synchronizing characters motion using a custom server. In the previous post, we’ve implemented the functionality to ‘login’ a player into the game world.…
2022-10-19

25. Unreal Engine and MMORPG – how to login into the game

In this post we’re exploring how we can ‘log into’ a game using a custom server. This is continuation for character creation/selection screen covered here. Specifically, it’s about the implementation…
2022-10-08

24. How to create custom character creation screen with Unreal Engine part 5

This post is part 5 of mmo character creation series. In the last post we’ve looked at creating characters via API. In this chapter we want to start getting the…
2022-09-29

23. How to create custom character creation screen with Unreal Engine part 4

This post is part 4 of mmo character creation series. In this post, we’re going to start connecting the Unreal Engine character creation to our custom server. I.e. when I…
2022-08-27

22. How to create custom character creation screen with Unreal Engine part 3

This is the 3rd post for the following steps: The objective of this post is to apply the settings from the right menu to the skeletal mesh on the left…
2022-08-17

21. How to create custom character creation screen with Unreal Engine part 2

This is a multi part post and is the second part: In this episode we’re going to cover the nested options that go into character creation screen. This is a…
2022-08-10

20. How to create custom character screen in Unreal Engine and N-Hance assets

In this post we will cover the basic strategy that we will use to create the character creation screen. This topic was quite large and its split this into multiple…
2022-07-24

19. UE – How to equip inventory items with custom server

In this blog post we’re integrating with the custom built Java server that can be found here and specifically implementing item equip functionality that was built in this blog post.…
2022-07-11

18. UE – How to generate dynamic icons from existing meshes

In this episode we’re going to take some skeletal meshes and create dynamic icons for them to use in Unreal Engine. This will be used to extend our inventory base…
2022-07-02

17. Unreal Engine and Java server – how to equip items with inventory

In this post we will have a look at what implementation I’ve put in place for equipping items. This post is extension for Chapter 13 – creating MMO inventory with…
2022-06-12

16. Unreal Engine – how to customize and improve inventory design

This chapter is an extension to 14. Creating UE Inventory connected to server. Note in this chapter I moved it to UE5 so we can see the code is always…
2022-06-03

15. UE5 – how to easily rotate objects with click and drag

In this post we will look at how to rotate object or character using blueprints, similar to character creation or character selection. YouTube summary of what’s covered here. Prerequisites In…
2022-05-27

14. Simple way to create UE MMO inventory with Java server

In the previous post, I covered the implementation of the back-end Java server work for a basic inventory system. Therefore in this chapter, we will be looking at the steps…
2022-05-11

13. MMO Inventory using Java and MongoDB – Simple Steps

In this post we’re going to have a look at creating a MMO style inventory system using Java. This will later be connected with Unreal Engine to complete the backend-frontend…
2022-02-27

Import Advanced Locomotion System into your UE project simplified

In this post we will look at how to import the Advanced Locomotion System which is a great, free asset available in Unreal marketplace. It’s a great starting point for…
2021-12-08

12. Unreal Engine MMO – Easy way to handle jump synchronization

This is an extension to the previous post where we handled motion. In this chapter, we will explore how to synchronize other motion, such as jump/fall and you can actually…
2021-10-28

11. Unreal Engine MMORPG – Simple way you can handle motion

In the previous post we’ve created a character creation screen and we’re able to log into the game. Now we will aim to make the map a shared space, i.e.…
2021-08-28

10. Unreal Engine + MMO: Character creation screen simplified

This is a continuation of the previous chapter where we designed a login screen. In this chapter we will look to not only create a character with a name, but…
2021-06-20

9. How to easily connect UE to MMO server with Java – P2

This is PART 2, if you haven’t checked, the previous chapter, we explored creating the C++ classes which will be used to integrate to our web server. In this post,…
2021-06-20

8. How to easily connect UE to MMO server with Java

In the previous chapter we’ve programmed a character controller in our Java Micronaut application which you can find here. This part is split into two parts, second being available here.…
2021-05-08

7. Easily configure your Micronaut with MongoDB – character controller example

In the last few chapters we’ve setup a basic Micronaut project with JWT authentication against Postgres table. You can find the chapters here: The code that we’re going through will…
2021-05-04

6. How to easily secure and encode user credential Java

The code for this project can now be found here. Note that this repository is branched from the Micronaut template that was created in previous chapters. The original template can…
2021-04-26

5. Implement simple and reliable JWT authentication with Java Micronaut

In this chapter, we implement Java JWT Authentication in our Micronaut project + check against user table. You can find the summary of this post in this youtube video In…
2021-04-18

4. Java and Micronaut – The easy way to get started

Make a game server with Java Micronaut, Jooq + Posgtgres + Flyway In the previous post, we had our java app store characters movements and send them to UE client.…
2021-03-31

3. UE5 and Java server: Easy steps to Synchronize motion

Note that a lot of ‘movement’ has been updated to use Websockets (and connecting to it via BP only in UE) in chapter 26 and chapter 27. However, if you’re…
2021-03-30

2. Java + MMO: Simple steps to handle player movement

Note that a lot of ‘movement’ has been updated to use Websockets in chapter 26 and 27. https://unreal-mmo-dev.com/2022/10/26/26-unreal-engine-synchronize-motion-with-a-custom-server/ However, if you’re looking for simple HTTP guide on achieving this, continue…
2021-03-29

1. How to start a basic game server with Java

I have spent about a week reading about how can I make a game server for a MMO type game. The majority of content that I find ends with “don’t…
2021-03-20

22. How to achieve simple and reliable authentication? part 2

Previous chapter showed how to implement Rails with AWS Cognito. This chapter will focus on how you can communicate with your backend for authentication purposes. Note that there are many…
2021-02-12

21. How to achieve simple and reliable authentication?

Follow part 2, which shows how you connect your React/Javascript front end to endpoints covered here. First of all, log into your AWS account and navigate to Cognito: https://console.aws.amazon.com/cognito/home You…
2021-01-31

21. Easy authentication with Rails and Devise

I am at a stage of the website where I require some authentication – in my case, to create content on the website, i.e. to make posts, I will require…
2021-01-09

20. How to make an awesome UI using React and a template

In some of the previous posts, we covered getting started with Material UI from scratch and also deploying those UI / Backend pieces. In this post, we will cover creating…
2020-11-09

19. Simple steps to get server-less front end with S3 bucket

So on my journey to learn more about re-platforming and micro-services I came across that you could actually ‘host’ your react front-end application in an s3 bucket. That’s pretty cool,…
2020-11-04

17. Re-Platforming for Improved Performance: Migrating from Rails to Microservices

We looked at deploying your application such as Ruby on Rails with Heroku. Now we may explore things like server-less design. Re-platforming is a big topic and a large undertaking.…
2020-11-04

18. Simple steps to making site secure with SSL and Heroku

We already deployed our RoR app to Heroku in this post. Let’s set up SSL with Heroku and our Rails application. I’ve actually wasted several hours sorting out SSL manually,…
2020-10-12

16. How To Upgrade Your Postgres DB In Heroku

If you haven’t yet deployed with Heroku, you may want to check out our previous post where we deployed our (Rails) app to Heroku. If you’re running an app on…
2020-09-27

15. Fast and easy way to optimise your Rails DB queries and Active Storage

This post is an extension to previous Active Storage post covered in section 7. Here we will look at an advanced query and fine tuning it to remove N+1 queries…
2020-09-13

14. Simple way to connect your Rails application to ‘Google Places’

In post 12, we covered how to create custom API clients to fetch data. It may be a good pre-requisite for this post if you’re not familiar with generating api…
2020-09-13

13. My personal startup accelerator experience with Entrepreneur First

This is a non-technical post unlike many others in this blog and is aimed at people who are considering to join a startup accelerator/incubator. It covers a small part of…
2020-09-09

12. Rails – Create A Simple API Client To Fetch External Data

In the previous post, we created our sitemap and connected to Google. We’re ready to start populating some useful data. In this chapter we will look at populating useful data…
2020-08-25

10. Simple Steps To Connect Your Site With Google

In this chapter we will look at basic setup of Google Search Console and generating sitemap for the search engines. In the previous post, we connected your web app to…
2020-08-25

11. RoR: Simple steps to generate your sitemap and connect it to Google

This chapter assumes you’ve linked to Google Search Console (check chapter 10 if you have not). Sitemaps are useful in your website to assist with SEO. They will be very…
2020-08-19

9. Simple way to link your domain + webapp

From previous post, we’ve looked at deploying our application with Heroku. This is now live at its own location (https://yazii.herokuapp.com/search-for-tech-jobs). What we’d like to do is make it available in…
2020-08-14

8. Heroku + RoR + React: Deployment made nice and easy

This post is going to go over the process of taking your Ruby on Rails application with Webpacker and React front-end and deploying it with Heroku. If you haven’t got…
2020-08-12

7. RoR and S3 – Easy way to setup active storage

If you haven’t created a RoR project yet, you may find this post useful to get started. Part of the project associations, most data can just be kept in the…
2020-08-02

RoR – Simple way to setup you database, models and associations

This chapter is relatively straight forward and is more of a refresher than anything else. It’s a reminder that spending time on determining the correct associations early will help save…
2020-07-28

RoR and AWS – Simple way to use Comprehend example

If you’re following the blog, we now have Rails setup with some basic front end components. What we may want to start doing is processing some items in the back-end…
2020-07-20

Simple way to get started with Material UI and RoR, React and Router Switch

If you’ve followed along in the previous steps, we now have Rails + React working nicely together and we’re ready to start putting in some cool content in. Just in…
2020-07-20

Rails and React – Single page application with Webpacker

Ok now you have your Ruby on Rails application, got all the basic pre-requisites completed and want to create a SPA with React. If you missed how to get the…
2020-07-20

Setup project essentials (Git and Editor)

When you start your project, you want to set all the basic essentials up so you don’t get delayed later, this includes setting up Git and your editor. For this…
2020-07-20

Nice and easy way to get started with ruby on rails, react and postgres

First thing that’s required to do when starting a website is to determine the technology you want to use. In my case, I decided to go with Ruby on Rails…