Directive 8020: Engineering gameplay, tools, and performance for Supermassive’s most ambitious chapter yet
As the latest entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology, Directive 8020 sees Supermassive Games push its cinematic horror formula further than ever. Following our successful work on Supermassive titles The Quarry, Man of Medan, and Little Hope, Room 8 Group’s engineering team embedded directly into this 100+ developer production for nearly two years. Our contribution encompassed gameplay, UI, tools, optimization, and project management— helping bring this ambitious title to life.
PC Gamer awarded it 85/100, calling it “an unmissable adventure for any fan of sci-fi horror.” IGN gave it 8/10, calling the game “chilling and impressive.” And TechRadar called it “a welcome evolution of Supermassive’s Dark Pictures Anthology,” highlighting the improved visuals and praising its approach to player choice—all aspects that our team played a big part in delivering.
Here’s how they did it.
The challenge
Directive 8020 was built on a richly developed codebase refined across a decade of Supermassive titles. For our team, the main challenge lay in integrating fresh gameplay features into the series’ existing systems, all while continuously upgrading the game to the latest version of Unreal Engine and ensuring it continued to run seamlessly throughout the process.
“With a long-running anthology like Dark Pictures, every new game adds features that the series’ systems were never designed for,” explains Andrea Tomei (C++ Unreal Engine Engineer). “You’re fitting new pieces into a codebase puzzle that’s been evolving for a decade, and developing tools along the way to help you do it as efficiently as possible.”
“As the project scaled, we expanded our contribution to match,” says Iuliia Stasenko (Project Manager). “From identifying the right specialists, communicating across disciplines, and delivering across multiple workstreams at once, we did exactly what an end-to-end external partner should do: adapted, and delivered.”
What we did
Gameplay systems that defined the player experience
Two engineers drove the gameplay systems that most defined the player experience: Eugen Zinchenko (C++ UE Gameplay Lead Engineer) and Andrea Tomei (C++ Unreal Engine Engineer).
“Implementing the game’s Turning Points system meant completely changing how the save system worked,” says Eugen. “The feature lets players rewind to earlier decisions and change the course of the story. It was a much more complex challenge than your standard save system architecture.” The solution used two distinct save layers: one holding player-level data like collectibles, another tracking specific playthrough progression, with a custom Gameflow solution to place story events on a timeline and travel back to them. “As one of the entire project’s trickier problems, solving it was incredibly satisfying.”
And from the critical reception, players found it satisfying too. PC Gamer’s review specifically called out the Turning Points system as the game’s defining innovation, saying it “shouldn’t work, but it does.” High praise indeed for an ambitious engineering solution that clearly landed as intended.
Eugen also developed The Messenger, an in-game communication system where each character had their own contact list and message history, with player replies that could affect the story. “The feature started as something you could skip entirely,” he explains. “But the design team kept expanding it, adding player interaction and then effects on character relationships. Because I’d designed the system to expand easily, every new addition just slotted in. It allowed the Messenger to keep evolving organically without the team losing unnecessary time to rebuilds or redesigns.”
A third responsibility involved rebuilding the in-game video player, which powered the game’s propaganda posters, interview boards, and secret recordings. “Each of these assets had separate audio and video files,” Eugen explains. “I built a sync layer to keep audio and video in time with each other, and also implemented a priority system to make sure the right videos played at the right times when players went near the in-game screens.”
While Eugen was developing those systems, Andrea was building the Scanner tool from scratch, a feature that emits a pulse to let players see through walls, highlighting enemies and hidden elements on contact. “It’s especially useful in stealth sections and in puzzles where it reveals hidden electrical elements,” he explains. “I set it up so designers could customize the visual behavior without touching the underlying code.”
Andrea also built the first-person camera system for vent sequences, the moments where players crawl through tight spaces and the view shifts from third to first person. Without it, the camera would clip through walls during the transition, instantly pulling players out of the experience at exactly the wrong moment.
“I engineered a smooth curved path for the camera to follow during the shift,” he explains. “It sounds like a small detail, but if the camera goes through a wall during a tense moment, the immersion is gone.”
Additionally, Andrea refactored the inventory system across single-player and multiplayer. “Implementing the new design for the inventory system meant rebuilding the legacy system from the ground up,” he says. “It wasn’t the obvious or easy answer, but it was the best way to avoid the bugs that can come with that kind of change. It was exactly the kind of solution studios look to an experienced co-developer to offer. So to get it right on such a critical feature was really satisfying.”
A full frontend overhaul
On the frontend, Eugen was joined by Nataliia Sokol (C++ Unreal Engine Engineer). Her task was to reimagine the entire frontend to fit the sci-fi look and feel of this new Dark Pictures installment.
"Most menus kept their logic but got a completely new visual style," says Nataliia Sokol (C++ Unreal Engine Engineer).
"We rebuilt choices from scratch to make them simpler and less distracting. We also redesigned notifications, moving them to the right side of the screen with different styles per category and a 'press to view' prompt so players could jump straight to new discoveries."
Nataliia also handled the frontend implementation of the Messenger, turning the system into something players could read, navigate, and react to.
The Turning Points system brought its own frontend demands. Because it lets players jump to specific decision nodes without losing their main save, the interface had to reflect multiple story timelines accurately and in real time.
“When the player rewinds, it’s not just going back to a save point,” Nataliia explains. “Character traits, secrets, and story progress all have to update to match that moment, and every one of those changes needed to be reflected accurately in the menus and interface. Making sure everything stayed in sync was a real puzzle. Time travel is complicated!”
Tools that saved the team thousands of hours
Andrea’s most impactful contributions were tools that improved productivity across the entire project.
“With over 3,000 animation sequences spanning 60+ levels, assigning work across the team wasn’t straightforward,” says Andrea. “Many sequences featured the same characters or were connected to each other. If we’d split them randomly, animators would have ended up working on the same things, creating conflicts and rework.”
To address this, he built a tool to assign animation work more efficiently. “It analyzed the connections between sequences and assigned batches of related work to individual animators automatically. Every team member got a clean, self-contained set of tasks with no overlap. What would have been a slow, complicated manual process became a fast, easy way to organize the entire team’s workload.”
Andrea also worked on a custom version of Unreal Engine’s built-in Movie Render Queue, used across disciplines to render video sequences for review.
“The problem was that renders weren’t reflecting the actual game state,” he says. “Things like costumes, lighting, and interactive elements like doors would appear wrong. It basically made review footage unreliable.”
“To fix it, I built a system that captured real gameplay data from overnight playthroughs and used it to set up each sequence in the correct state before rendering,” he says. “With that in place, the review scenes suddenly matched what players would actually see, meaning approvals became considerably faster.”
Profiling and optimization for console
In the final phase, the team focused on memory and CPU optimization for Xbox Series S and PS5.
One standout example involved audio middleware platform Wwise, which package together the game’s sound effects, music cues and voice lines ready for the engine to call on during play.
"I found that 60% of our soundbanks were loading at startup, long before they were needed," says Andrea Tomei (C++ Unreal Engine Engineer). "On a console with a fixed RAM budget, that was a significant chunk of memory being consumed before players had even reached the content it belonged to.
Optimizing meant building a streaming system to load them at the right moment instead, along with a migration tool to convert all the existing references automatically. That single change saved 500MB, which is a meaningful amount on hardware where every megabyte counts."
Production management
When the team joined the project, they became a fully integrated part of the partner’s organization, working toward shared objectives with internal stakeholders.
Iuliia Stasenko (Project Manager) made sure that setup turned into predictable delivery: keeping priorities aligned across both teams, holding focus on key milestones, and catching risks before they turned into blockers.
“Transparency was the thing that made it work,” she says. “Clear communication, regular reporting, constant contact with stakeholders—the partner always knew where we stood, what was next, and what might get in the way. When people have the full picture, they make better decisions.”
Her role in managing the team went beyond matching the right technical expertise to the work. She also focused on keeping people engaged by making sure specialists had opportunities to work on tasks that interested them and supported their professional growth. “We talked about this with each team member, and with the partner as well,” Iuliia explains. “Where possible, we adjusted the scope together so people could contribute in ways that were meaningful for them while still meeting the project’s needs.”
She was also responsible for keeping the team running effectively—supporting people, unblocking issues, and adjusting team composition when the work called for it—so the team could maintain a sustainable pace from start to finish.
“The technical expertise was always there,” Iuliia adds. “My part was the operational side—coordination, accountability, a clear framework—so the partner could rely on us as a genuine extension of their own team, from onboarding through to completion.”
The result
Our engineering team delivered across gameplay, UI, tools, optimization, and production management—embedding within a 100+ developer project as trusted contributors for nearly two years.
Scope of work
+ Gameplay systems development
+ UI programming
+ Tools and pipeline development
+ Engine optimization and profiling
+ Project management
Need engineers who can embed quickly and deliver across disciplines?
From gameplay systems and UI overhauls to custom tooling and console optimization, our team integrated into Supermassive’s workflows and delivered at the standard their most ambitious project demanded.
If you need engineering support that operates as a genuine team extension, let’s talk.