Thirteen years ago I made a fake point-and-click mockup — an image, never a playable game. It was the seed of a whole personal universe: The White Cat Watches. This diorama is a homage to that origin. The same scene, the same gaze, rebuilt in 3D thirteen years later — a rotten cyberpunk den where a sinister clown named Marlin waits, sparks fall from a pentagram, and the storm never stops outside.
It's not a game. It's a technical piece — a staging. You explore: five cameras frame the scene, an "Explore" mode reveals what some objects hide, and you can switch between color and a noir atmosphere.
The interesting part (for this crowd) is the pipeline: hand-drawn in Quill (VR modeling), baked through Blender, and brought into Unreal Engine 5 for cinematic lighting and post. Getting Quill's raw, manual stroke to survive UE's cinematic render was the whole challenge.
A bit of honest context: I'm an illustrator and designer by trade — this was my very first time working with Unreal Engine. The diorama started as a learning exercise to nail down the whole Quill → Blender → UE pipeline end to end, and it grew into something I'm genuinely proud of. If you spot rookie mistakes on the technical side, I'd love to hear them — I'm here to learn the engine.
On the process, fully transparent: all the art is original and hand-made — modeling, textures, lighting, animation, none of it AI-generated. AI did play a role, but strictly as a technical co-pilot: it helped me assemble the engine logic and debug the Unreal side. The vision and every aesthetic decision are mine.
▸ Free on itch.io (Windows, pay what you want): https://dumakerpro.itch.io/the-white-cat-watches-diorama Feedback welcome.