Published March 2026, Square Enix
My contributions to Reunion as it exists now are more echos than hands-on work – originally, the systems I was helping build and contribute to were as different to the the previous systems as the original story was to the story it became. Once the layoffs in 2024 hit, plans were completely reworked and ambitions were left to gather dust in test scenes.
For instance, we explored moving locomotion animation to the Unreal motion matching system, which never got far past prototyping. In the final release, we use the same system I created for Double Exposure, which I wrote about in my development article on it.
That does not mean no new tech made it in to Reunion – The cinematics system was ported from the proprietary story teller engine to the new cinematics system we built inside the level sequence system. I was instrumental in helping fix bugs related to single frame animation pops, rewind animation bugs, and of course, porting over seamless transitions.
You can learn more about the principles of our seamless transition technology in my article about The Expanse, where I go into detail about how the system works.
I’m not sure if it was fully integrated, but I also built out a new camera rig that worked as a single component with a camera child. This was a solution to ensure we had direct control over how the camera physics worked, while only needing a single component similar to a built in Unreal camera rig.
The one system I worked on the most before it was scrapped was a system for running what we called “gameplay cinematics”- basically, it was a way to have captured animations and dialogs happen during freeroam without entering cinematics. The goal was to create a system that balanced robust, immersive interaction and dialog with an automated pipeline that required as little cleanup as possible.