In 2023, development on Project Elysia: Blackout began with a single engineer and a single goal: prove that a competitive tactical FPS could be built from first principles without cutting corners.

Three years later, the codebase tells the story. The PEB module is a single monolithic unit containing approximately 2.3 million lines of C++ distributed across 949 source files. It is built using Unreal Build Tool (UBT) and Unreal Header Tool (UHT), leveraging UE5.6's latest networking and rendering features.

Solo architecture at this scale introduces unique challenges. There is no division of ownership. Every subsystem, from netcode to animation, passes through the same mental model. The advantage is coherence: nothing is built that the author does not fully understand. The cost is iteration speed. A full rebuild can exceed 30 minutes, and incremental changes still require careful dependency tracking across the monolith.

The decision to keep everything in one module was deliberate. Early prototyping showed that cross-module boundaries in UE5 introduced friction that slowed experimentation. For a team of one, friction is fatal. The monolith allowed rapid pivots: fire modes, armor systems, and Commander mechanics all evolved in the same compilation unit without interface churn.

As the team expands in 2026, modularization is now on the roadmap. The plan is to extract TIMA-related systems first, followed by gameplay mechanics that stabilize. But the foundation will always be that single 2.3M-line commitment to understanding every line of the game.

This is what "no shortcuts" means in practice.