#gamedev #THDAWT After watching PixelxKitten stream my demo, I fixed a bug where the garage lights weren't occluded by the garage door if Global Illumination was set to "low". Tl;dr: Remember when testing in UE5 that Lumen and emissive lights are disabled on low and medium GI scalability settings!

#gamedev #THDAWT Thanks to a suggestion during @kingargaroth.com's stream, I've now added helpful *notification dots* for unread deduction entries as part of the UI revamp for The House Dreams Along With Them.

#gamedev #thdawt I've updated the UI for The House Dreams Along With Them to have nifty animations! The pieces of the UI slide into place to reinforce the motif of reification and to match the dream pillars that oscillate endlessly in the black void of the lucid dream worlds.

Excited to announce my atmospheric horror puzzle game, The House Dreams Along With Them, has received an *honorable mention* in the nuovo award category for the 2026 Independent Games Festival! Now I can use the fancy pixelated laurel PNG for my marketing! #gamedev #THDAWT

#gamedev #THDAWT The laptop in the guest bedroom for The House Dreams Along With Them is now functional. You can change the wallpaper! This uses a material instance array set on the player controller to cycle through the options.

#gamdev In UE5, *sometimes things just crash*. The culprit *could* be blueprint corruption; check if your character BP has blank details panel for components like Character Movement. If so, reparent the blueprint to Actor then back to Character or revert in source control, AKA learning to Git good.

#gamedev For #THDAWT, I made a fully functional electronic drum set and drum sequencer for puzzles (and fun)! This video shows off the controller experience where the d-pad snaps to the drums and automatically zooms into the sequencer when hovering over it.

#gamedev In UE 5, when Global Illumination settings are medium or low, Lumen is disabled so you can't use emissive lights to fill a scene. But I added a blueprint to dynamically activate hand placed non-Lumen fill lights to compensate on lower end hardware for #THDAWT!

#gamedev If you are using "level streaming position" in Unreal 5.3 and Play-In-Editor to test in-game, be warned the *editor's* position value *will always be used* even if you load into a level that uses a different one! Avoid this by loading a different level in-editor or using standalone mode.

For the demo of #THDAWT, I decided to disable the random drift offset for the pillar lifts in the living room dream. This means that you can't accidentally save/load *inside* a moving pillar anymore because it can't randomly start higher than its default Z value. Hooray! #gamedev

#THDAWT For button glyphs, I use an awesome SIL Open Font licensed font called Promptfont! (Available at: shinmera.com/docs/promptf...) It makes adding new glyph presets very simple (currently I have M&K, Xbox, and PlayStation presets). #gamedev

#THDAWT #gamedev If anyone else is using UE5's Enhanced Input User Settings and Enhanced Player Mappable Key Profiles to query keys for diegetic UI (and who isn't?), remember to use the "Register Input Mapping Contexts" node first! The "Add Mapping Context" node isn't sufficient.

I've added in new wooden doors to the house in #THDAWT. It is a slightly edited version of the awesome free "Modern Door" by Yami757 on Fab. All it needed was to be squashed a bit in Blender and then have a new material instance created in Unreal.

For the intro tutorial of #THDAWT, I've added a small drawer staircase to guide the player up and onto the *completely normal* bed. This is to be amenable to non-action players that don't *automatically* jump on top of everything from years of platform game conditioning.

#THDAWT The garage lights in The House Dreams Along With Them Demo will now turn on *if you crawl under them* when the garage door is open. Thanks to @cclementyne.bsky.social for catching this bug on his Halloween stream!

Inspired by watching prostoic.bsky.social play through the demo, I've added a line of lights to keypads in The House Drams Along With Them! This means that in addition to audio cues, there is also a visual indicator for how many times a keypad has been pressed.

The demo for The House Dreams Along With Them has been updated! Now there's an autosave feature in case you forget to manually save (or didn't know you can save and load even in the demo). store.steampowered.com/app/3891660/...

The House Dreams Along With Them already had an invisible autosave system to help with persistence between levels, but now I've started implementing a manual "load autosave" button to save players who *forget* to save.

The trigger boxes that turn on the lights for the garage puzzle in The House Dreams Along With Them were a *bit* too thin and the player could sneak past them. Bug is now fixed, hitboxes have been embiggened!

I'll never not be amused by the late-90s-discounted-3D-modeling-software-advertisement energy of Unreal's camera component when using the Lit editor view mode.

Unreal pro tip: Making your blueprints look like side-view thumbnails of sci-fi capital ships guarantees 15% fewer bugs when testing.

I updated the logo treatment for my game! V1 on top and V2 on bottom. The new style pushes the orange and purple aesthetics more and has more background details using the recently added Quixel Megascans Black Alder trees.

If you're using Unreal's enhanced input to do basic things like *looking around*, remember to add a "Get World Delta Seconds" node (multiplied by a value to taste - 60 worked for me) to make the rotation framerate independent!

The demo for my horror puzzle game #TheHouseDreamsAlongWithThem has been updated! store.steampowered.com/app/3891660/... Now there's a step-by-step UI to teach how to enter a lucid dream near burnt rusted objects.