Interview
April 17, 2026
How AdHoc used Unreal Engine to deliver 2025’s narrative-driven hit Dispatch
AdHoc Studio is an independent game developer founded by an award-winning creative team established in 2018 by industry veterans from Telltale Games, Ubisoft, and Night School Studio. The diverse and growing team has been the creative force behind some of the most groundbreaking interactive narrative titles to date, including their critically acclaimed 2025 debut game, Dispatch.
With a constant stream of content coming from the fictional worlds of superheroes and supervillains, have you ever wondered what would happen if some of those larger-than-life characters had to assume the roles of average, everyday citizens? Specifically, what would it look like for powerful protagonists to not only physically navigate the average office filled with uninspired cubicles, but also the interpersonal relationships that come with a corporate career?
That’s exactly what the team at LA-based developer AdHoc Studio was thinking back in 2022 when they set out to make Dispatch—a narrative-driven, superhero workplace comedy in a similar spirit to The Office, but where every choice matters. Since its launch last year, the game has been recognized in numerous award categories and players have had an outstandingly positive response to its story, slick visuals, and all-star voice cast including Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright, Erin Yvette, Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, Matthew Mercer, and others.
So, how did the small-but-mighty team at AdHoc leverage its gaming industry experience to push the episodic adventure genre forward while selling over 1 million copies in the first 10 days—and what role did Unreal Engine play in the process? We dialed up AdHoc’s CTO and Creative Director Dennis Lenart and Lead Programmer Seth Kingsley to learn more about this super-powered project.
That’s exactly what the team at LA-based developer AdHoc Studio was thinking back in 2022 when they set out to make Dispatch—a narrative-driven, superhero workplace comedy in a similar spirit to The Office, but where every choice matters. Since its launch last year, the game has been recognized in numerous award categories and players have had an outstandingly positive response to its story, slick visuals, and all-star voice cast including Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright, Erin Yvette, Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, Matthew Mercer, and others.
So, how did the small-but-mighty team at AdHoc leverage its gaming industry experience to push the episodic adventure genre forward while selling over 1 million copies in the first 10 days—and what role did Unreal Engine play in the process? We dialed up AdHoc’s CTO and Creative Director Dennis Lenart and Lead Programmer Seth Kingsley to learn more about this super-powered project.
Thanks for joining us and congratulations on all of the success surrounding Dispatch thus far! For those unfamiliar with the project, could you please provide a brief overview of the game and how the concept of a “superhero workplace comedy” came about?
Dennis Lenart, CTO and Creative Director: Dispatch is a superhero workplace comedy set in modern day Los Angeles. You play as Robert Robertson, aka Mecha Man, whose mech-suit is destroyed in a battle against his nemesis, forcing him to take a job at a superhero dispatch center: not as a hero, but a dispatcher. In charge of rehabilitating a group of ex-supervillains, you must manage your roster while navigating office relationships and rebuilding your suit for a shot at revenge.
When we started work on Dispatch, we wanted to create an experience that took our favorite parts of comedic TV shows like The Office and mix them with the fun, fantastical world of a team of superheroes like The Avengers. Having these larger-than-life, vibrantly colored characters walking around the dull backdrop of an office full of cubicles was an image we gravitated toward early on and then we continued to build on the concept from there. Additionally, we’re a small team, so the idea of being able to confine the setting of the game to a sitcom-style location like an office with a recurring cast of characters was helpful from a budgetary standpoint as well.
As a narrative-driven project, what were your core goals for the interactive elements of Dispatch, and how were you looking to take the episodic adventure game genre to the next level?
Lenart: It was very important to us that the narrative and gameplay elements blend together seamlessly. Having Robert, the player character, take on the role of a dispatcher as his day job was a way for us to create an organic context that the player would use while playing the more “gamey” elements of the experience. Then when his shift ends, he takes off his headphones and gets mixed up in the office politics and drama that anyone who’s ever worked in an office will be familiar with…except in this case, your co-workers have super powers.
One of our goals for interactivity in Dispatch was to build a mechanic that offered more depth than games we had worked on in the past, but also could remain simple enough on the surface for anyone to be able to pick it up and have a good time playing. The strategic nature of dispatching shifts ended up being the perfect way to do that. We iterated on it for a long time during both pre-production and production to make it something that could scale across the entire season of content, while still feeling relevant to the narrative scenes that surrounded them.
© AdHoc Studio Inc. 2026
As the first original title from AdHoc, why was Unreal Engine chosen for this project and which UE feature(s) stood out to you most during development (and why)?
Lenart: We actually ended up using Unreal 4.27 since we started the project in 2022. Once we got far enough along into development, it became too late to upgrade without affecting our schedule so we decided to stick with it through release.
We did end up backporting “CommonUI” features from UE5 into our version of 4.27 to solve some issues that our UI artists were encountering, as well to be able to utilize it for the foundation of our gamepad support. This allowed our UI team, programmers, and designers to all build gamepad support using a common system that for the most part just worked—as opposed to doing a lot more manual work like they had been doing previously.
Where is AdHoc Studio based and how big is the team working on Dispatch?
Lenart: We are a remote-first studio and have been since our inception in 2018. This has allowed us to build a team of really talented developers from all over the world (though most of them are still in relatively close time zones to California, which is where the largest number of members on our team is based).
Our internal team at AdHoc hovers at around 30 people at its core. During different phases of production, we scale up from there based on the needs of the project at the time, with additional contractors and outsourcing partners as well.
© AdHoc Studio Inc. 2026
Considering the team size at AdHoc, which UE feature(s) had the largest quantifiable impact on cross-discipline workflows? How did these features help the team reduce iteration time, improve team collaboration, and/or lower production costs throughout the development process?
Lenart: Blueprints are a huge part of our workflow, allowing our programmers, designers, UI artists, and several other members of our team to collaborate in a powerful, meaningful way. Given our small team size, they enabled our developers outside the engineering department to prototype and create features that became core to our game’s experience like the shift and hacking mechanics.
How have UE’s lighting, materials, and environment tools helped you achieve the game’s distinctive visual art style?
Lenart: Since we are mostly playing back video clips in the engine, we didn’t use much in the way of lighting and environment tools, but our shift gameplay sections were all created with materials / UI. We did, however, use Unreal’s Sequencer for previsualization of some of the more complex scenes in the game, which played a pivotal role for iterating and communicating ideas to the rest of the team so they could understand how the cameras and characters moved around a space.
© AdHoc Studio Inc. 2026
Dispatch’s achievement in cinematic storytelling is impressive. From a production standpoint, how did the team achieve such a high caliber without a traditional AAA-sized budget or team?
Lenart: Since we didn’t have a large team of graphics engineers, we decided to pre-render the cinematics using traditional offline rendering methods. Stylistically, we were creating what we were calling a “western anime” visual style, and part of the aesthetic was to hand-paint many of the game’s backgrounds to achieve a certain look, which ended up making a lot of sense with compositing the entire frame offline.
Additionally, since we had previously worked on cinematic games in our career that were known to have visual bugs, hitches, and animation pops at times, we wanted to focus on delivering a smooth, consistent experience and building our own branching video buffering system ended up being the best way we could find to achieve our high quality goals with a small engineering team.
Could you please describe the role Sequencer played in bringing the game’s cinematic nature to life?
Lenart: Coming from a background in cinematics, many members of our team naturally think in terms of visual timelines, including our audio engineers who are used to working in Pro Tools and FMOD. Sequencer’s interface was the hub for playing back all of our cinematic content, even though it wasn’t real-time rendered.
We also used Sequencer to do visual scouts of environments, making many important decisions about how we wanted to lens a scene before any actual production animation started. For several scenes in the game that required careful iteration, intricate staging, or complex movements, we would use Sequencer and Control Rig to build sections out in 3D that we could use as a template to help get members of the team across all different disciplines on the same page.
© AdHoc Studio Inc. 2026
What can you tell us about developing the dispatching gameplay? How did the team “find the fun” and what role did Unreal Engine features play in facilitating quick iteration?
Lenart: Blueprints were crucial to our team being able to make quick prototypes. We had designers, programmers, and UI/UX artists of all various experience levels working together each day. They were able to iterate quickly so we could playtest often internally. Our designers were often able to create new features all on their own, which was critical for a small team like ours. Having the ability to create a bunch of playable ideas quickly and then constantly playtest them allowed us to iterate, sometimes even on the fly, finding problems and solutions rapidly.
Our main “dispatch shift” mechanic was something that continued to evolve and grow during development, and Blueprints became a core reason we were able to do that.
Did you take advantage of any of the in-engine animation tools in bringing the iconic characters to life? If so, what sort of benefits did this elicit?
Lenart: As I mentioned previously, we used Control Rig keyframing in Sequencer for many key scenes in our game that required previs. Since we are a small team, this allowed many different artists from around the studio to open a sequence and scrub through and edit the blocking without having to be an animator.
© AdHoc Studio Inc. 2026
Were you able to leverage C++ and Blueprints in tandem to streamline development across teams?
Seth Kingsley, Lead Programmer: As Dennis mentioned, having Blueprints has allowed many members of the studio to work independently on gameplay, UI, and audio, all without needing a programmer to implement every last bit of behavior they need. On the other side, as a C++ programmer exposing engine functionality to Blueprints, it feels very natural due to the rich language features and tight integration with the UObject runtime.
How important has it been for you to have access to UE’s source code throughout development?
Kingsley: As comprehensive as the documentation is, it’s difficult to imagine working with such a large engine without source code access. Because your game runs inside the framework provided by the engine, being able to do source-level debugging instead of having to black-box the engine layers is a huge advantage. Beyond that, you can learn a tremendous amount by reading Unreal source code. Not only does it function as a reference implementation of how various engine systems should be used, but it shows you how to achieve performance, modularity, and portability without sacrificing readability.
Because we had to stay on UE4 for the duration of Dispatch development, having source access was essential for the work we did to backport CommonUI and CommonInput functionality from UE5 back to UE4.
© AdHoc Studio Inc. 2026
How have Unreal Engine’s profiling tools assisted your team with debugging and performance optimization?
Kingsley: Unreal Insights has been invaluable not only for profiling our game’s resource usage, but also when diagnosing timing-related bugs across multiple systems. Without having this ‘big picture’ view of the activity for things like file I/O, asset loading, rendering, and the task graph, it would have been much more difficult to isolate certain categories of bugs. Being able to annotate a capture with logs and custom bookmarks is very powerful as well.
The in-engine real-time stats are very flexible and easy to extend with custom metrics, and we made good use of those as a first line of defense against expensive rendering passes, slow Blueprint tick functions, texture memory consumption, and other performance concerns.
Did the team take advantage of the UE documentation, Epic Developer Community, Epic Pro Support, or other parts of the ecosystem like Fab throughout development?
Kingsley: We definitely made use of every resource we had available. In a few cases, we were able to find the solution to problems we were having posted to the Epic Developer Community, and sometimes this meant pulling a fix from UE5 onto our source branch. When it came to porting, the platform-specific developer forums included a lot of valuable advice.
Early in development, we used a few Fab asset packages as placeholder content for prototyping and previs. Later, we integrated a few developer productivity plugins, some custom widgets, and a text animation package.
© AdHoc Studio Inc. 2026
Which Unreal Engine features would you consider “must-learn” for small teams?
Kingsley: I would say that proper use of Unreal’s gameplay architecture is key. Making sure everyone agrees on how you want to distribute responsibilities across the family of gameplay Actors: the Game Instance, Game Mode, Player Controller, AI Controllers, and Pawns. This will help when managing and debugging the overall state of the game.
Do you have any advice for indie teams evaluating Unreal Engine today?
Kingsley: I think if you’re going to invest in Unreal as an indie, it will really pay off to try to leverage as much of the engine’s built-in functionality as possible before looking for a third-party plugin or building something custom. Unreal has so many subsystems available, and building a basic familiarity with as many of them as possible will help you harness the full power of the engine in creative ways.
As an example, our shift gameplay runs through a series of scenarios that pop up at specific times. Rather than make a custom asset to represent the overall timing of the scenarios, we just used a Level Sequence. When you’re in a shift, this Level Sequence is playing in the background, and an Event Track is triggering each scenario at the right time. When a scenario window is open, we pause the Level Sequence, and when we reach the end of the Sequence, the shift is over. When it came to authoring one-off events or conditional scenarios, we used the Director Blueprint. It’s very convenient to have a Blueprint graph available inside the same package.
Using a pre-existing subsystem like the Level Sequencer made it possible for everyone to easily see the timeline of the shift in a visual way, and even though Sequencer is not being used for its conventional purpose as a cinematic tool, the way we repurposed it has worked out quite well for us.
© AdHoc Studio Inc. 2026
Looking forward, which key features and functionality of Unreal Engine 5 are you most excited by?
Lenart: While we developed Dispatch in Unreal 4.27, we have been using the latest versions of UE5 all along the way in a separate project to use for previsualization. Sequencer, Control Rig, and animation tools in UE5 are all fantastic, and although we weren't actually shipping any of that content, it did help us be able to block out important moments in the game that we could use as reference for our animation team downstream.
Our team is also looking forward to features like the UI materials lab. Our UI/UX Designer Robyn said, 'It's a perfect bridge for artists to get into the engine and reduce barriers to creation." We're also fans of the whole UI/UX overhaul in the actual editor itself. It feels very intuitive and streamlined. User widget extensions are also something our programmers are excited about, and one of them specifically referenced a big interest in being able to have instanced structs.
Thanks for your time! Where can people go to learn more about Dispatch?
Lenart: The AdHoc Studio website (https://www.adhocla.com/) and the Dispatch Steam page and blogs are a great place to catch up on the Dispatch journey. Folks can also get connected with our social communities.
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/adhocstudio
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BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/adhocstudio.com
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Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theadhocstudio
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-adhoc-studio