Interview
April 16, 2026
Mixtape: Making the magic of nostalgia come alive in Unreal Engine 5
Beethoven & Dinosaur is a creative video game team operating out of Melbourne Rock City. They made The Artful Escape. They won a BAFTA. Now, they're making Mixtape, a coming-of-age adventure featuring music from the Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, Devo and many more. They have never been officially convicted of any crimes.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing. The mix of emotions and memories brought on by certain experiences, including listening to music, often carry us back to better days and simpler times when the world seemed a little less lame.
But exactly when or how nostalgia is formed remains a mystery, with the trick being to try and embrace the “good old days” before they become them.
Mixtape goes on a journey to capture the essence of nostalgia and explore the mystery of creating it.
Based in Australia, developer Beethoven & Dinosaur has stuck with Unreal Engine after producing the award-winning 2021 title The Artful Escape and now brings its signature style of uncompromising creativity to life with Unreal Engine 5 in Mixtape.
We recently caught up with Beethoven & Dinosaur’s Technical Director Roman Maksymyschyn, and Creative Director Johnny Galvatron to learn more about the small indie team’s use of UE5 for animating in-engine with Control Rig, accessing source code to extend the engine, quickly iterating on ideas via Blueprints, and, as one might expect, getting extensive use out of MetaSounds to bring the game’s all-important audio experience to the forefront.
Want to hear what they had to say? Check out our interview below.
But exactly when or how nostalgia is formed remains a mystery, with the trick being to try and embrace the “good old days” before they become them.
Mixtape goes on a journey to capture the essence of nostalgia and explore the mystery of creating it.
Based in Australia, developer Beethoven & Dinosaur has stuck with Unreal Engine after producing the award-winning 2021 title The Artful Escape and now brings its signature style of uncompromising creativity to life with Unreal Engine 5 in Mixtape.
We recently caught up with Beethoven & Dinosaur’s Technical Director Roman Maksymyschyn, and Creative Director Johnny Galvatron to learn more about the small indie team’s use of UE5 for animating in-engine with Control Rig, accessing source code to extend the engine, quickly iterating on ideas via Blueprints, and, as one might expect, getting extensive use out of MetaSounds to bring the game’s all-important audio experience to the forefront.
Want to hear what they had to say? Check out our interview below.
Thanks for joining us! Mixtape looks like a nostalgia-filled trip down memory lane. Could you please tell us what the game is all about?
Roman Maksymyschyn, Technical Director and Johnny Galvatron, Creative Director: Mixtape is the story of three high school friends spending their last day together before they leave their home town forever. It’s a surreal collection of music, memories, and eras set to the soundtrack of a generation.
Where did the concept of creating a coming-of-age story set to an iconic soundtrack come from?
JG: We’ve always been inspired by coming-of-age films, hangout films, and media centered around transitional periods—like John Hughes films—where the characters know they stand upon a great precipice of change. The feeling of “things will never be the same,” is a wonderful core to build your story around. It’s timeless, romantic, and most of us can see our reflections in there somewhere.
© 2026 Annapurna Games, LLC. Developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur. Published by Annapurna Interactive. All rights reserved.
More so than most games, the soundtrack in Mixtape plays a central role in the experience. Did you have an initial listing of specific tracks in mind to include or did the roster take shape over time?
RM: Johnny laid out a playlist to begin with—his greatest hits, from Devo to the Smashing Pumpkins. We experimented with different arrangements, different versions. We’d replace songs, take songs in and out. Each arrangement, each mixtape, told a different story and had different lulls and crescendos. We settled on the final order around two years into production.
Where is Beethoven & Dinosaur based and how big is the team working on Mixtape?
RM: Beethoven & Dinosaur is based in Melbourne, Australia, and the core team is 12 people.
Why was Unreal Engine 5 chosen for this project and which UE5 feature(s) stood out to you most during development (and why)?
RM: We chose UE5 for many different reasons, but for us, it is the best way to remain on the cutting edge of game development technology as an indie team, giving us access to many different technologies and features that we wouldn’t have time to build ourselves with our team size.
We especially love having open access to source code, as it allows us to quickly dive into what is going on behind the scenes, customize the engine, and quickly pull in specific features and fixes from future releases when we need them.
© 2026 Annapurna Games, LLC. Developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur. Published by Annapurna Interactive. All rights reserved.
From coasting downhill in grocery carts to toilet papering houses, there seems to be quite a bit of variety in the experiences offered by the game. How did Unreal Engine 5 help you prototype, iterate on, and ultimately polish the various gameplay elements that are featured in Mixtape?
RM: I think a big reason we were able to have so much variety in our gameplay across the whole game is due to our ability to rapidly prototype and iterate using Unreal’s Blueprint visual scripting system, since it allowed us to quickly slap together different ideas without much overhead or commitment to figure out what works.
We also made a decision early on to architect our code in such a way that we could make big changes to individual levels and assets without having a knockon effect to other areas of the game—which really freed us up to do whatever we wanted creatively and iterate on each section of the game in parallel.
How have Unreal Engine 5’s lighting, materials, and environment tools helped you achieve the game’s distinctive, dreamy visuals?
RM: Unreal has a great set of tools that enabled us to get something up and running quite quickly, but the best thing about the toolset is the ability to iterate upon and customize any aspect of the pipeline to get the exact look we wanted. For example, we are using a custom shading model for our characters to get the specific look we are after.
© 2026 Annapurna Games, LLC. Developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur. Published by Annapurna Interactive. All rights reserved.
What were the biggest visual wins you got “out of the box” from Unreal Engine?
RM: It’s hard to pinpoint one specific element, for us it’s more about the fact that there is such a wide range of features that are working together to give you an incredible baseline to work with and customize from there.
As a small team, how has leveraging UE’s built-in animation tools simplified your pipeline?
RM: We use lots of Unreal’s animation features, whether it’s authoring complex behaviors via Animation Blueprints, or managing dynamic animation priorities via montage slots, but one of most useful features has been Control Rig. We use this all the time for more standard uses like Look At and Foot IK. But for some parts of the game, we have opted to fully animate within Unreal, which has been fantastic for quick iteration and transparency between the tech and animation teams, with the whole process being encapsulated within Unreal.
We also use Control Rig for making minor adjustments to existing animations in Sequencer, animating wheels on skateboards, etc., and even to add some turbulence and noise to cars, and things like that.
Considering the game’s emphasis on audio, were you able to leverage MetaSounds to impact the game’s overall sound design?
RM: Yes, we use MetaSounds extensively throughout the game and really enjoy the process of putting them together. It’s both fun and useful seeing the audio graph flow live while tweaking things, and in general it is a very powerful tool.
One of the most useful MetaSounds we made in Mixtape is a MetaSound that allows you to provide a sound wave—specify a loop start, end, and fade durations—and have audio play with some intro, then seamlessly crossfade back into itself at the specified points. This allowed us to turn all kinds of non-looping sounds into seamless loops, including music and continuous sound effects, but it’s particularly useful for music where you want to play the first part of the song and then loop a later part without providing separate assets and having to schedule playback.
© 2026 Annapurna Games, LLC. Developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur. Published by Annapurna Interactive. All rights reserved.
Which UE5 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?
RM: There are plenty of features that help cross-discipline workflows—for example, being able to create montages so the animation team can adjust blend timings independently of our tech team, or the built-in Perforce integrations preventing us from accidentally working on binary assets at the same time and causing conflicts. But what has accelerated our development the most is the ability to extend the editor and create custom tooling that is very specific to our needs—for example, debug menus that allow you to play in editor from a specific point in the game.
Were you able to leverage C++ and Blueprints in tandem to streamline development across teams?
RM: Yes, both have served a crucial role during the development of Mixtape. It’s great to have the option to write performant code in C++ and choose what to expose to Blueprint for designers, and having a means to do more visual things like position mesh components and set materials in Blueprint.
© 2026 Annapurna Games, LLC. Developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur. Published by Annapurna Interactive. All rights reserved.
How important has it been for you to have access to UE’s source code throughout development?
RM: It has been absolutely critical, and is one of the main reasons we keep choosing Unreal Engine for our projects. Outside of the obvious benefits of being able to rapidly debug, extend engine code, and pull individual upstream fixes, it also serves as a great reference point for our own code when trying to determine what is best practice, or when we’re just curious how Epic does something, especially when it comes to making any custom editor tooling or extensions.
How have Unreal Engine’s profiling tools assisted your team with debugging and performance optimization?
RM: Unreal's profiling tools have been very useful, in particular we use Unreal Insights all the time to figure out where performance bottlenecks are or to debug hitches, whether it’s in editor or a build. We have also been making use of the new Audio Insights tool a lot lately, which has been very useful when debugging and mastering audio in our game.
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?
RM: Yes, we have found value in all of the resources listed above. I think it’s another big advantage of using a popular engine that you are often not the first person to encounter certain problems, so there is often already a discussion somewhere online with an explanation or fix for whatever you are dealing with. But it’s also nice to be able to escalate and get help directly from Epic when you need more specialized support. We occasionally do use Fab for prototyping if we can see something similar to what we were intending to prototype anyway, even if it’s just to get some ideas or take things we like or don’t like about it.
In addition to these resources, the content examples are extremely useful, since it’s nice to be able to jump in and see exactly how everything is configured in context, as well as having a baseline that you can check against to see what they are doing differently if you couldn’t get a feature to work in your own project for some reason.
© 2026 Annapurna Games, LLC. Developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur. Published by Annapurna Interactive. All rights reserved.
Which Unreal features would you consider “must-learn” for small teams?
RM: I think this is largely dependent on what kind of game you are making, but I would say a big unlock for us was getting more familiar with Sequencer, and using it to author more gameplay rather than only using sequences for cinematics. It’s a great option to author a surprising amount of things once you get the hang of it, and allows for quick iteration since you can scrub through the timeline to get a preview without having to play the game.
I would also encourage small teams to spend some time learning how to make Editor Utility Widgets, Asset Actions etc, since they are powerful and you can make them quickly entirely in Blueprint and save a lot of time on tedious and repetitive tasks. We have tons of these in Mixtape and use them all the time.
As we celebrate Indie Games Week, what advice would you give to other small teams who are setting out to make their first game in Unreal Engine?
RM: I would advise that teams try not to get too caught in the weeds when starting out—there are many different ways to achieve the same result in Unreal Engine, so just get something going and let the momentum from that carry you forward. You will learn as you go, and if you find better ways of doing things, you can always refactor or do it that way on the next game. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Thanks for your time! Where can people go to learn more about Mixtape?
RM: https://mixtape.game/