Cardinal Fall: A Free Volunteer-Driven Indie Game by Metahusk

Our community project is open for development to all members of the community, regardless of skill level.

About The Game

Cardinal Fall is a nonprofit, community-developed, story-driven, 3d side-view, single to four player multiplayer, survival-horror, co-op videogame set within an original far-future dystopian sci-fi universe.

Set in the year 2742, you play as a clone—known as an Echo—located in a research facility where catastrophic events are unfolding. In the game, players will explore a series of sprawling locations while planning a way to escape their eventual fate. Having multiple outcomes, Cardinal Fall will test the player and their friends as they navigate, learn, and survive the hostile environment they find themselves trapped within.

Demo: Epic and Steam
Direct Source Download: uProject Files
Bug Reports: Report Bugs Here
Issue Tracking: Repository Issues (Only those with a committer badge can submit. Use the bug tracking thread here.)
Design Document: pdf file

Youtube Video

Why are we doing this?

Having come from Valve’s Source Engine in 2014, we noticed there seems to be fewer giving back to the game development community, especially after the pandemic. Recognizing a trend that has steadily increased since the early 2000’s, we’ve set out to create a game development cooperative consisting of those who share a similar intent.

We’re grateful grateful that video game engines are accessible to everyone, and we hope to encourage new developers to learn about game development by hosting community projects. During our journey, we’ve used community assets along the way and we would like to help further the community by hosting community projects.

Learning game development isn’t easy. We want to help by making games—together.

How can I help?

If you’d like to participate, other than helping with the development of the game, you’re always welcome to donate to our nonprofit, share information about the project with others, or leave us words of encouragement on platforms like Steam. Anything you can do is greatly appreciated.

What are we currently focusing on?

Our first pre-release build used generative AI tools to finish some aspects of the project that we didn’t have contributors for—like voices. With the ever-increasing tendency of AI being used to displace the human imagination, we regret making this decision.

As such, we have completely abandon the use of generative AI tools for art creation going forward. We may still use AI tools for things like code review, but from now on, our projects will champion the preservation of the human-touch within creative endeavors. We think AI-free projects will become increasingly rare due to the cost savings generative content can provide. But being unmotivated by profit, we believe we’re in a unique position to take this direction. Nothing on this website was written—or even reviewed—by AI. And we want to be able to say the same for the creative aspects of our projects.

Therefore, our primary goal is to replace the project’s generative placeholder assets, which can be found in this milestone.

Besides that primary task, we’re also focusing on implementing our virtual Neuroscape Realm, which can be found in this milestone.

Finally, as with any development projects, we have open issues to solve, which can be seen in our issue tracker.

What if I’m new and I’m concerned about the direction of Unreal 6?

We understand the concern some people are having about the changes announced for Unreal 6, especially in regards to visual scripting. And we share some of the same sentiments. But learning an engine like Unreal 5 will still be useful going forward. There are a lot of developers still using Unreal 4 and Unreal 5 will be around for a long time. On top of that, Unreal 6 probably won’t be out until 2029 and the interface and the underlying tools will likely be very similar.

What if I would rather develop a project on an another engine like Godot?

As of 2026, we don’t have an active project outside of Unreal Engine. If you’re highly motivated, want to commit to leading a project on another engine, and are willing to carry the torch for a while on a project idea you have, let us know and we may grant you repository access and promote your project as a member of Metahusk. Although without larger backing, we cannot accept every project as we have limited resources and large project repository hosting isn’t free.

What are the performance differences going from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5

After upgrading to Unreal 5, we lost about ~9% performance but the game still runs on a GT 1030 or an RX 550. (Low end hardware from 10 years ago) If we were to turn off SSR, the performance loss would have only been ~2%, but we decided to keep SSR on for now. You can revert the features back to Unreal 4 settings pretty easily. We’re by no means experts, but we’re surprised there’s not more talk about keeping Unreal 5 performance on par with Unreal 4.

Can I use parts of this project in my own? Why don’t you open source it right away?

We made the repository private to protect our commits from automated bot scraping and asset flippers. Once the full game ships, the project will be released under an open‑source license.

In the meantime, you’re free to reuse your own contributions or anything you build on top of the project—just give credit where it’s due. If you’ve already invested a lot of work and want to incorporate specific parts of our project into your own, let us know what you’ve created and we’ll look into arranging access to the files you need.

More about Metahusk:

We’re a US based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organized to provide an alternative for creative development through the collaboration of like-minded individuals. We intend to enable one another through the utilization of a non-profit structure designed to foster a mutually innovative and creative learning environment.

Back in 2016, we launched our first build of Cardinal-Menu for Unreal 4, which peaked at ~27,000 downloads. We hope to do the same—and more—for Unreal 5.

If we attract substantial donations to the organization, our long-term plan is to build a small dormitory-like facility where the most promising future game developers can develop games together while continuing their education. Donations will be used to fund the future of the organization. It would require raising capital, but we aim to stay as low budget and self-sustaining as possible. A 21-page working draft of our organizational plan can be found at the bottom of the main page of our website.

If you have any thoughts, questions, or comments, we would love to hear from you below.

Thank you for taking the time to learn more about us,

-The Metahusk Team

Parvan