Hidden State Games

Blog

Engineering notes, war stories, and things we learned the hard way building Hidden State Games.

Dev log Announcing Bay 23 Aug 4, 2026 · 1 min read We’re making Bay 23: a co-op extraction game where you and your crew are package-handling robots working a shift in a facility that doesn’t want you reading the labels too closely. Build infrastructure BuildGraph without Horde: one-command packaged builds Jul 24, 2026 · 6 min read BuildGraph ships with Unreal and you can run it straight from the command line, no CI server required. Here’s a script that builds and packages your game, the command that runs it, and why it’s worth the setup even as a solo developer. Dev log A night chasing a Steam connection bug, and the one-line cause Jul 24, 2026 · 14 min read Friends couldn’t join each other’s games for weeks. We spent a long night fixing real networking bugs, none of which were the cause. The actual problem was a single line left behind by an earlier fix for a bug we never had. Build infrastructure Patching Unreal Toolbox's Horde proxy for large files Jul 23, 2026 · 6 min read Unreal Toolbox’s Horde proxy buffers whole responses into memory and restarts itself every time the access token refreshes. With 30-second tokens and a 2.8 GB PDB, nothing ever completes. Two one-line fixes, plus how to build and deploy a patched Toolbox to your team. Build infrastructure Setting up Horde's symbol server Jul 21, 2026 · 10 min read Horde ships a Windows symbol server that indexes PDBs out of your build artifacts, so there’s no separate symbol store to feed or clean up. Here’s the server config, the BuildGraph side, how to verify it end to end, and the traps worth knowing before you start. Build infrastructure Uploading to Steam from Horde BuildGraph Jul 17, 2026 · 7 min read A cook-to-Steam pipeline in BuildGraph: keeping steamcmd credentials out of the job, VDF templates that default to not going live, generating them robustly, and the path details that make one script work across projects. Build infrastructure Running Horde CI on a single build machine Jul 15, 2026 · 8 min read How our per-commit CI is set up on a single on-prem Horde agent: binaries on code changes, cooks on content changes, plus the workspace layout, schedule config, and the BuildGraph details that matter when you don’t have a farm. Build infrastructure Two days chasing a 60-second timeout: a Horde UGS-PCB upload debugging story Jun 27, 2026 · 9 min read Self-hosting Unreal’s Horde with an on-prem build agent, our UGS precompiled-binary uploads kept dying at 60 seconds. A dozen dead ends later, the fix was four lines, in a process I hadn’t even been looking at. Build infrastructure Self-hosting Perforce and Horde on one cheap cloud box Jun 20, 2026 · 14 min read How a three-person studio runs Perforce Helix Core and Epic’s Horde on a single cloud server with one on-prem build agent: the architecture, how each piece is configured, and the decisions that keep it small.