duckenheimer

independent videogame developer,
Unreal Engine generalist

About Me

Hello!I am a game developer from Atlanta, Georgia.I primarily make my projects in Unreal Engine - though I've dabbled with modding and creating content for videogames for much of my life.I studied biology at the University of Central Florida and completed my bachelor's degree in 2019.
One of my goals is to include what I learned during my studies in fun and surprising ways in my games.


Contact

these buttons are connected directly to my phone/brain.
they can cause it (the phone) to make a sound when they're pressed.


Here are some of the projects I've released:

[detailed (boring) technical text warning]
[there are pictures too]


The Gladdening Chamber

The Gladdening Chamber is a horror mystery game with interactive narrative and pen-and-paper puzzle gameplay.The player is tasked with gathering clues found on in-game websites to discover what happened to a friend who has recently disappeared from their online community.

This game was featured in DreadXP's Ultra-Indie Spotlight!

The game's story takes place on a virtual desktop computer using an interface I built out with nested widget blueprints in UMG.The system is rendered to a widget component in world space that picks up the player's keyboard and mouse interactions and passes them back to the widget "operating system".


Here, the render result from UMG is being used to drive the input for a CRT shader, so the game's computer monitor has visible chromatic aberration and aperture grille/pixelation, scan lines, etc.


Web pages are stored as widgets that each hold the content for one page, and each is assigned a unique index for the web browser to use for navigation.The web browser also stores recently accessed pages for back/forward button functionality.


With this game, I wanted to capture the feeling of a late-night Wikipedia crawl, and exploring clues with others who were invested in solving a mystery.There are updating webpages in the game that change as you progress through the story, including forum posts and daily news articles. It's been described as something of a "singleplayer ARG".

The Gladdening Chamber was developed over the course of two months and released for Halloween 2020 on itch.io for free, and can be found below: