Fact Sheet
Company: Aesir Interactive
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Platforms: Steam, Epic Games, PS5
Release: Mar 3, 2026
Team Size: 10-20
Systems I owned: Breeding, Mission and Dialogue Systems, Open-World (Rivers, World Partition Streaming, Day/Night, PCG)
My Work
As Tech-Art Lead on Khiimori I managed a team of four tech artists while owning a set of open-world and gameplay systems myself.
On the gameplay side I built the mission and dialogue systems. This evolved work I'd first done on Horse Tales, rebuilt to be far more designer-friendly: a dedicated editor for authoring mission trees, plus validation to catch broken or incomplete missions early, so designers could create and iterate on content without needing engineering support.
For the open world I owned the toolset: landscape generation with Errant Worlds, World Partition streaming, and a day/night cycle (first on Ultra Dynamic Sky, later migrated to Unreal's Day Sequence plugin). I also built custom spline-based river tools directly in-engine using PCG and Geometry Script, letting designers carve rivers procedurally into the terrain instead of hand-modeling them.
To speed up world-building further, I created a pipeline that imported real-world Mongolian heightmaps into Unreal as landscape brushes for Errant Worlds, so designers could lay down authentic terrain and landmarks far faster than building them by hand.
Post-Mortem
Two things, both choices that made sense at the time but that I'd weigh differently today.
First, the landscape pipeline. Errant Worlds gave us a powerful procedural landscape workflow quickly, and it was a pragmatic choice for getting the world up fast. What I'd weigh more heavily now is the cost of depending on a license-based third-party plugin: keeping it aligned with Epic's and our own coding conventions, and the fact that an engine upgrade is effectively gated on the plugin author shipping their update first, whereas with first-party or in-house tooling we can drive those upgrades ourselves. Epic's native tooling has also moved quickly in this space since we shipped, between the Landmass and open-world workflows showcased in Project Titan, and the new Mesh Terrain system Epic introduced at State of Unreal 2026 as a system for authoring complex 3D landscapes without the limitations of heightfields. Today I'd lean toward building on first-party tech and reserve third-party plugins for cases where they clearly earn the dependency.
Second, sequencing. Khiimori's world is genuinely one of its strengths, and investing early in making the Mongolian landscape and the open world feel impressive was a reasonable bet. With hindsight, I'd push to validate the core loop and chase the fun earlier and in parallel, getting missions and moment-to-moment gameplay into players' hands sooner rather than letting the world lead. Finding what actually makes a game like Khiimori fun is the riskiest unknown, and I'd want to de-risk it as early as possible.
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