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SimpleX Plugin Series

SimpleX Plugin Series

Tue Oct 07 2025

TL:DR

The SimpleX plugins are a modular, data-driven suite of Unreal Engine 5 plugins built to save indie devs from rewriting boilerplate and common gameplay functionality. Each plugin focuses on a single gameplay function: attributes, inventory, leveling, stats, and more. They integrate seamlessly through subsystems, actor components, and plain UObjects.

MiniGameDev on Fab: https://www.fab.com/sellers/MiniGameDev

Why I Built the SimpleX Series

Hey everyone! For the last couple of months, I’ve taken a step back from working on my game, A Witch’s Path. I had a lackluster prototype I released. Even though I didn’t get a ton of players, I was able to watch a couple testers play it. And the verdict is… it’s okay. That’s another article in itself, but my takeaway from it is I need to level up my design skills and get more testers. 😅

So after the prototype was out and I knew I had a big refactor on my hands. I did what any rational game dev does. I started something new to avoid it. 🙃 However, this new project is going to drive the refactor of A Witch’s Path and will help accelerate any games I build in the future.

What do they offer?

The idea was to build a modular plugin ecosystem for Unreal Engine 5+, specific to indie devs. I wanted the plugins to serve indie devs the most and to start where I don’t see many plugins start, with the data.

What I’ve found over the years is that many plugins are either too rigid or too opinionated. They want to own the whole lifecycle of the game or they force your game to be architected around the plugin instead of the other way around.

The SimpleX plugin series flips this.

Each plugin:

Think of them like a Gameplay Ability System (GAS) Super-Lite. It’s nowhere near as powerful, but it doesn’t have to be either.

Built-In Editor Tools

Each plugin ships with an Editor Module allowing you to visualize subsystem data live while your game runs. From the moment your project starts!

Simple Leveling Editor showing Leveling Tracks & XP Table

Unit Tested

Each plugin has near 100% unit test coverage over the subsystem, component, and objects. This could be a whole other article 😁. I wanted to ensure everything was rock solid for every user so you can build your game logic with confidence.

How do they work?

Subsystems

Each plugin has a UGameInstanceSubsystem as its primary integration point. These are singleton objects that are managed by Unreal. They can be accessed anywhere there’s a UWorld or UGameInstance object.

Actor Components

Some of the plugins provide a UActorComponent subclass modeled after the subsystem API. In SimpleAttributes, you can manage your player’s attributes at the subsystem level and then give your enemy actors their own attributes via the component.

Plain UObjects

And finally, each plugin uses UObject subclasses to drive the entire functionality. So in the case of SimpleAttributes, there’s a USimpleAttribute object. And if the subsystem and component don’t serve your needs, you can freely use the USimpleAttribute to drive your functionality with the same API.

Storage Support

To support serialization and deserialization, each of the plugin’s subsystem, component, and plain UObject all support the same functions:

<Storage Struct> GetStorage()
InflateFromStorage(<Storage Struct>)

These serialize the data into structs that can be stored anywhere, including the USaveGame subclass for your game. And on load of your game, the subsystems, components, and objects can deserialize the data restoring the game state. And you control the whole process.

What don’t they offer?

For v1 all plugins do NOT support network replication. This may be added in a future update, but for now I want to make sure the foundation is rock solid for single player games.

Where to go next?

If you made it this far, thank you! At the time of writing this I have 4 plugins that are live on Fab with 10 more planned. And who knows, in the future, there may even be more.

Each plugin has a GitHub repository with full documentation, an example project, and the plugin’s issue tracker.

Get the Plugins

If you use one, drop a review or tag me. I’d love to see what you’re building!

Unreal Docs