Road to VHL #1: From Unity to Unreal Engine 5

Road to VHL is a short series retracing three years of development. This part covers August 2022.

VHL didn't start in Unreal Engine. The earliest version of the game was a Unity prototype. It was enough to prove to ourselves that top-down competitive hockey was worth chasing, but not much more.

In August 2022 we made the call that shaped everything since: scrap the prototype and rebuild in Unreal Engine 5. Starting over is never comfortable. But the vision for VHL was always high-fidelity, fast, and online, and UE5 gave us the ceiling we needed. Modern rendering, a serious physics foundation, and an engine built with dedicated multiplayer servers in mind.

The first milestone in the new engine was deliberately unglamorous: get a player skating and dribbling a puck in a test arena, and make it feel right.

That clip won't win any awards, but it's the oldest surviving footage of VHL as it exists today. Responsive skating, a puck that behaves, and the top-down camera that defines how the game plays.

Everything else got built on top of this moment: the rink, real multiplayer, the whole visual identity.

Next: Part 2: Building a rink for a sport that doesn't exist.