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TGC Game Jam: Remembrance

Game Programmer | Game Jam | Unreal 5.6.1

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Skills - Unreal 5.6.1 | Perforce | Materials | UMG | Blueprints

Remembrance is a product of a 2-week game jam hosted by thatgamecompany. Developed by 5 interdiscipline members, composed of two programmers, two artists and a sound designer.

I implemented and designed a data driven dialogue system using Unreal Engine's data assets. Which allowed myself and the other members of the team to easily iterate over the narrative. Additionally, it allowed for correct and easy timing for events surrounding the dialogue.

Additionally, I authored post-process materials leveraging Custom Render Depth and Stencil buffers to apply global desaturation with selective resaturation masks and a modular interactable blueprint outline system.

Dialogue UI

First, with our game being heavily narrative based. I wanted to make sure that important dialogue could be accidentally skipped. So I had boolean flags that could be easily set that made any line wanted unskippable.

To give the dialogue feel a bit more alive, I added a typewriter effect, which also helped make sure that players didn't actually skip it, since it added another level of "visual" security.

When creating the UI, I was tasked by the narrative designer to keep camera blends, and companion behaviors in mind. Due to the dialogue being data driven, it was easy to add in additional flags that could be checked by the other members if they wanted to easily add in a camera blend. Also, the programmer and artist who was in charge of the child character, easily hooked into the dialogue system to add in companion behaviors.

Dialogue Data Assets and Structure

This is what the data driven dialogue looked like. I made a structure, "FDialogueLine", that would resemble a line of dialogue. Which allowed us to control what could happen, such as camera blends, or child color changes, at specific lines in dialogue sequences.

Dialogue Sequences were composed of an array of how ever many dialogue lines we wanted. So we would have either trigger boxes in the level that would call upon these data sequences, or we could call upon them during run time.

Post Process Materials

Since one of our goals for the narrative was to bring back "color" to your town/memories. It was vital that we could be able to saturate specific areas/objects, while the remaining world is still desaturated.

I used Unreal's Custom Render Depth with Stencil masks. During runtime I would get all actors within a certain trigger volume and change their stencil values. At first this was jarring due to no lerp effect/transition. So I used a Material Post Collection with a parameter that was used in the material. Then I would use a timeline to lerp this value.

Modular Interactables

We wanted drawing pickups in the game that would trigger saturation and drive narrative events. However, we soon realized that we could do a lot more with a modular interactable blueprint. This allowed us to have "pre-requisite" objects, which would lead up to the final interactable of that area.

Additionally, the interactables were event driven, and would call upon camera blends, companion behaviors such as assigning new spline paths.

Programmer Responsibilities:

Developed a designer friendly dialogue system that supported rapid iteration and content authoring.
Ensured core systems were data-driven to improve scalability and ease of extension.
Implemented a post-process desaturation material that selectively resaturated world elements using stencil masking.
Exposed system interfaces for integration with companion AI behaviors.

Challenges:

As this was my first time working extensively with Unreal Engine’s material and post processing pipeline, diagnosing and fixing visual issues was time intensive and required rapid experimentation under tight deadlines.
The game jam took place over the Christmas and New Year holiday period, resulting in a compressed schedule and limited availability, which required careful time management and prioritization to meet the submission time frame.