Unreal Engine 5.8
The game you cannot playtest is the game you never make.
AI made output cheap. Making a game did not get easier.
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit · Unreal Engine 5.8 · Free on your own hardware. Open where it counts.
01
Make it playable.
02
Keep it traceable.
03
Graduate it deliberately.
04
Replace it safely.
The gap
A mechanic described is not a mechanic felt.
A design document can say “inject the stimpack”. On screen that verb is a small production — and until enough of it exists, nobody can answer the only question that matters.
The motion faces the wrong way. The hand misses the prop. The mesh has no collision and the wrong real-world scale. A new generation fixes one thing and quietly breaks another, and nobody remembers what produced the version the game already uses. That distance is the playable gap.
Generated, recorded or authored — every candidate enters the same production lifecycle.
Closing it is what Automation Forge is for — the first implementation of PlayableOps. Motion, voice, faces, meshes and surfaces become candidates you can review, place on the right target, trace back to what made them, and replace safely when the real work arrives. The whitepaper makes the full case.
Recorded in the editor.
No cuts to hide a wait.
Where we sit
The bottleneck is the wait, not the talent.
The wait between deciding something and being able to play it is where an early game loses its months — the weeks between a design and the animation, the voice and the face that have to exist before anyone can tell whether it works.
We sit in the gap between a decision and the playable version of it, and we make that gap smaller. Everything here assumes the pipeline you already have and adds throughput to it. Automation does the work; people own the decisions.
The landscape this replaces is divided: one model per modality, one format per model, a manual step between every pair, and none of it built to be automated. Automation Forge is one harness over all of it — providers pluggable, costs known before they are spent, local where you have the hardware — built for you and for the agents working beside you.
The bet is not that generated assets are good enough to ship. The bet is that a game which has been played for six months before its first real asset is authored is a better game.
Three ways in
Prototypefor everyone
Generate what the prototype needs so the thing gets played this week rather than next quarter. Animation, voice, faces and montages, in the editor, from a written description.
Shipfor indies
Some of it ships. The engine tooling has no generation in it at all — montages, weight remapping, the pipeline executor, the ledger — and is ordinary production code. Of the generated content, the triage is explicit: many VO lines, subtitles and secondary gestures never need replacing.
Throughputfor studios
Every asset in the production, accounted for — what it cost, who approved it, where it landed, whoever made it. Lines, takes, approvals, and a production brief precise enough to hand a mocap house. A studio that never generates a single asset can still run this as a VO and mocap tracker with a clean path into Unreal.
Trinity Architecture
Two users. One surface.
Software has always had two sides and one connection: the software, and the human, joined by an interface built for a person. A second user has appeared in that relationship and it is a machine — not a script driving a UI made for someone else, but a genuine consumer with its own needs and its own failure modes.
So we design for a triangle. Every operation lives on a typed subsystem; the editor UI is a thin layer over it and the agent toolset is a different thin layer over the same thing. Neither contains logic, so neither can drift. If a function needs a widget to work, the design is wrong.
Building for the machine user produced a better API for the human one — idempotent, non-blocking, typed, and costed before it commits. We did not set out to improve the human experience by serving the machine. That is simply what happened.
The family
8 sets, 34 plugins.
Free on your own hardware. Open where it counts.
8 sets, one pipeline — and more on the way.
Motion is where the suite began, not where it ends. Motion, voice, faces, meshes recorded performance and surfaces ship today, and ArtForge is the layer above them. Every set runs through the same providers, the same ledger and the same pipelines, whether a person is driving or an agent is.
Coming
ArtForge
The creative direction layer.
One versioned style source — palettes, references, rules — that every other Forge generates against, so a thousand generated assets read as one game instead of a thousand prompts.
Nine steps in, the run holds.
Amber means a person decides.
Leave it running. It stops exactly where you said.
An automated run does what you told it and nothing else. It prices the work before committing, skips everything it has already done, and holds any decision a machine should not make — the run suspends, and waits for you. That is what makes it safe to wire 8 sets together and walk away.
Measured
Numbers we took ourselves.
Every figure on this site came off a run in our own project — one per capability, so the whole proposition fits in a row: a playable scene costs minutes and cents, and running it again costs nothing.
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a motion take, prompt to clip
A fresh prompt to a finished clip on the character you paired, locally on your own card. The prompt encoder is the slow part and needs bf16: on an older CPU without it, a new prompt takes minutes rather than seconds, and re-using a prompt skips that cost entirely.
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a 95-line scene, fully voiced
Ninety-five lines voiced from scratch on a hosted provider, character-level timing attached.
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face solve time to audio length
One second of solve per two seconds of audio, locally on CPU, with no account. On a GPU through Audio2Face-3D it is about 1 : 4 end to end.
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a second run over an unchanged project
The ledger knows what it already made. A re-run executes nothing and spends nothing.
Coming
The web workspace. Paid per seat.
Kovati Pro
Your content team is bigger than your Unreal team. Pro is a web workspace for the writers, narrative designers and VO directors who own the words and the performances: they write, generate takes, direct and approve in a browser — and approved work lands in the project correctly wired, the next time a developer syncs.
The first thing it does is the thing nobody else does: hear and watch a scene play before Unreal is involved at all.
And when the design settles, Pro turns what your team kept into a production brief — the exact list your VO studio and mocap house record against, delivered through the same workspace, tracked in the same ledger as everything generated.
Opens a message to bojan@blackcode.ch. One email when Pro opens its doors. Not a newsletter.
Start here
Start with the plugins. Free on your own hardware.
The suite installs free and runs complete on your own machine — motion on your GPU or a rented card, speech on your own provider account, faces and montages on the CPU you already have. Open source where it counts. And when the team outgrows one seat, Pro is the same pipeline with everyone in it.
Opens a message to bojan@blackcode.ch. One email when something ships. Not a newsletter.