The Bureau of Fantastical & Arcane Affairs is a comedic first-person narrative adventure. As an inspector at the Bureau, the fate of this fable is in your hands. Do your job, fix the shambled story—or… don’t. The choice is yours. When you're done, step into the hero’s boots and see what sort of tale your work wrought.
Hip Flask Games, the studio behind The Bureau of Fantastical & Arcane Affairs, is a volunteer-based studio with 60+ passionate and determined volunteers.
Note: Due to this being an unpaid volunteer role, I am allowed to share my work before the game’s launch.
My Contributions (Programming Lead)
Implemented menu functionality based on the UI/UX designer’s Figma wireframes
Programmed both 3D diegetic menus for in-game immersion with 2D confirmation menus to signal important actions to the player
Utilized UMG animations for UI and timelines for world objects to flow smoothly between gameplay and menus
Ensured seamless transition between mouse and controller use
Programmed user settings for gameplay, audio, and video options
Prototyped minigames for quick internal testing.
Engineered a scene capture Blueprint to export and process in-game screenshots for use in save slot previews
Communicated with other team leads on my team’s progress and assisted with any blockers other teams had related to programming
Duration: March 2025 - Present
Game Engine: Unreal 5
Menus
Current progress on menus is shown below. The scene capture feature is also shown off in the save menu.
Menu art and design is by Rodrigo Madureira.
Main menu scene concept is by Vanessa Nakasone (Temp main menu design in-game right now).
Quest Tracking
I have also worked on quest tracking through the clipboard so that the player can view the choices they made. Reports are written in and characters are counted to ensure a word doesn’t start on one line then move to the next. It also saves what lines of the report have been written for the next time the player opens up the clipboard!
Minigames
I prototyped fishing and documentation inspection minigames. Both were well received by members of the team!