AdHoc Studio Delivers Dispatch on Unreal Engine

Dispatch is a narrative-driven superhero workplace comedy that shipped on Unreal Engine 4.27 to over a million copies sold in its first ten days, earning three BAFTA 2026 awards for Animation, Audio Achievement, and Supporting Performer.

AdHoc Studio — a remote-first team founded by veterans of Telltale, Ubisoft, and Night School Studio — built the game entirely Blueprints-first, using Sequencer and Control Rig for previs and CommonUI backported from UE5 to unify gamepad support across the team's diverse hardware.

The result is a \"western anime\" visual style combining hand-painted backgrounds with pre-rendered cinematics, all driven by a custom branching video buffering system that keeps interactive choices seamless.

A small remote-first team needed to deliver high-caliber cinematic storytelling without an AAA budget. The game required pre-rendered cinematics that remained fully interactive and branching — no room for pre-baked sequences that locked players out of choice.

Gamepad support had to work reliably across a wide range of player skill levels, from controller-veterans to casual keyboard-and-mouse users. And because the team had already outgrown the UE5 upgrade window mid-production, staying on 4.27 meant forgoing any engine-level quality-of-life features that shipped in later versions.

The team backported UE5's CommonUI and CommonInput from source to 4.27, giving the entire codebase a unified input abstraction that handled gamepad, keyboard, and mouse without per-screen rewrites.

Pre-rendered offline cinematics were built through Sequencer with hand-painted \"western anime\" backgrounds, while Control Rig and Sequencer together handled previs for complex scenes — letting animators iterate on camera work and character blocking before a single frame was committed to final render.

The dispatch-shift gameplay mechanic runs on a paused Level Sequence: an Event Track fires scenarios into the scene, the sequence pauses for player interaction, then resumes once a choice is locked. A custom branching video buffering system pre-loads alternate paths so transitions between branches feel instantaneous.

Dispatch sold over a million copies in ten days and won three BAFTA 2026 awards: Best Animation, Audio Achievement, and Supporting Performer.

The \"western anime\" visual style — hand-painted backgrounds layered with pre-rendered cinematics — gave the game a distinctive identity without the render cost of real-time photorealism. Sequencer repurposed as a gameplay timing engine let a Blueprints-only team build core mechanics without a single C++ programmer on staff.