Encadré

About

You're walking through a Canadian boreal forest. A fisherman teaches you photography, and your goal is to fill an album with bird photos good enough to win a contest. The team was 3 programmers and 8 artists (including a sound artist), so the game looks and sounds way better than your average student project.

Camera Capture Plugin

The core mechanic is taking photos of birds. There's no built-in "camera that saves pictures" in Unreal, so I built a custom plugin for it. The plugin captures what the player sees through the viewfinder, processes the image, and serializes it to disk.

• Cinematic capture sequence with full control over framing and timing
• Real-time lens focus adjustment with depth of field simulation
• Image serialization to disk for persistent photo storage
• Scoring snapshot that captures bird positions, distances, and framing data at the moment of the shot

Lens Focus System

To make photography feel like a real craft, the player can adjust the lens focus in real-time during the capture sequence. The game simulates a cinematic camera with depth of field. Adjusting the focus parameters on the post-process lens lets the player blur the background and isolate the subject, just like real photography.

Photo Album

The player browses their photos in a physical album. The biggest challenge was making the page-turning animation feel realistic and tactile. It needed to sell the illusion of holding a real book.

• Flip through pages with realistic page-turning animation
• Zoom into any photo for a closer look
• Delete unwanted photos from the album
• Scoring breakdown per photo with a score out of 100
• Written commentary on each photo explaining how to improve

Scoring Algorithm

Every photo is scored out of 100 based on distance to the birds, number of birds in frame, focus precision, and centering. A perfect 100 means the photo nails every criterion.

Photo Commentary

Each photo gets a written comment explaining what could be improved (too far, off-center, blurry focus) so the player always knows how to get a better shot next time.

Browsing Photos

Photos are laid out in the album. The player flips through pages to review their shots.

View & Delete

The player can zoom into any photo or delete the ones that didn't turn out well.

Diegetic Menu System

To keep the player immersed, the entire game menu lives inside the game world. It's integrated into the player's album. Instead of a traditional pause screen, the player navigates through bookmarks using a custom navigation system. Each interaction fires events that other systems can hook into, so another programmer on the team was able to build the options menu on top of it without touching the navigation code.