We are thrilled to share a very special, bumper edition of Made with Synty! The team at AdHoc Studio generously agreed to chat with us about their use of Synty assets when prototyping their episodic adventure game Dispatch.
In this interview they share how the idea for the game came about, how some bad news turned out to be a blessing in disguise, and all the ways assets support their studio’s ongoing workflow! In case you somehow missed it, Dispatch was released in October 2025, and this highly popular and award winning game is available on Steam, PlayStation, XBOX Series X, Nintendo Switch 1 and 2, and coming soon to mobile.
Now grab a snack and settle in, and let us take you back to the very beginning.
“The story of Dispatch is as old as our studio itself, going back to 2018,” co-founder Dennis told us. The four co-founders of AdHoc Studio—Dennis Lenart, Nick Herman, Pierre Shorette, and Michael Choung—met many years ago while working at Telltale Games on beloved titles like Sam & Max, The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands. As many developers do, they began talking about starting their own studio in order to continue to evolve the interactive story genre they hold so dearly. They were united by the philosophy that interactive stories are for everyone, and so their goal became finding ways to reach new audiences. Dennis adds, “as a group of devs venturing off on their own, we were out looking for opportunities to help lay the foundation of our studio, and the first one where we felt some sort of alignment was getting the chance to create an interactive TV show for a tech company called Eko.”
In 2018, Eko was building an interactive streaming platform and looking for content. Think Netflix’s “Bandersnatch” but with additional browser-based interactive elements. They were fans of some of the team’s work at Telltale, and this was when the idea for what would become Dispatch was born. “Most of our experience was working in 3D, but Eko’s focus was live-action television, so we started thinking of ideas that we could pull off in that format. The company was new and we had a limited budget, so we came up with the concept of a superhero show where you play as a hero-dispatcher in a corporate office. This allowed us to have a small cast of characters and a limited number of sets to build, since most of the drama would take place inside a simple-looking office building and most of the action would take place outside the building ‘offscreen.’”
“We wrote the scripts and designed all the interactivity playing to the strengths of Eko’s web-streaming technology. We were getting close to shooting in early 2020, but then the pandemic hit and all live-action productions were shut down across the globe. Eventually Eko pivoted their business model and all of their interactive narrative projects were cancelled, including Dispatch. We were incredibly disappointed at the time, but in hindsight it was the best thing that could have happened for Dispatch.”
And so, the team put the game on the shelf and moved on to other projects. A couple years and a few projects later, they began musing about the potential of the Dispatch concept again. “We decided to refocus our studio around putting everything we had into finally bringing Dispatch to life. But it wasn’t as simple as just pulling the scripts off the shelf. We decided to re-evaluate everything. All of our previous experience was in making games and more specifically, working in 3D instead of live-action, so we reimagined the entire experience and style of Dispatch to play more like a game and look like a premium animated television show. It was a huge shot of adrenaline for the studio that, after a few years of hard work, finally led to the release of the project that has come to define our studio.”
Using Synty to Prototype
The team started using Synty assets early in development to create environments for their early gameplay and cinematic prototypes. “AdHoc is different from many game developers in that we start with a story idea first and then, once we have a foundation we’re excited about, we push and pull the edges of that idea to create mechanics that complement the story. For Dispatch we created a gameplay mechanic where the player receives a series of mundane emergency calls (a fight at a tailgate party, a thief robbing a donut store) and then must choose who to send out to each crime scene from a roster of low-tier superheroes.”
While most of the calls in the game are exclusively audio and UI-based, some of them allow the player to view the action unfolding live via security camera feeds from the crime scene. “One of the first calls we ever wrote in the earliest draft of Dispatch was from a donut store owner who was in the act of having his store robbed by a thief. In order to get a sense for how the scene would play out from an interactive standpoint, we decided to previz the whole thing in 3D. We have a previz project set up in Unreal, where we store a lot of our asset packs for prototyping, so I hopped into the engine, grabbed a bunch of assets from the SIMPLE Shops Interiors and POLYGON City asset packs and made the layout of a donut store that we could use to stage the action.”
The scene ended up working so well that it remained in the game throughout all future rewrites and different incarnations of the script over several years as it moved from live-action into its eventual video game form of animation. When you look at the original previz compared to the final render in the game (below) you can see how much that initial 3D layout informed the final look of the scene.
Save Time (and Money!) by Prototyping Comprehensively
“On Dispatch one of our core pillars was for the game to look like a premium animated television show. In order to achieve this, we took inspiration from traditional linear animation production pipelines and decided to storyboard the entire season of cinematic content from beginning to end before starting on animation production. Animation is by far the most expensive part of the process and as an independent developer making our first game together as a studio we didn’t have a lot of wiggle room in our schedule, or budget to make big changes down the line, so we had to lock things down as quickly as possible.”
One of the main aspects of Dispatch is a choice-based interactive story, which is complicated to produce, so the team needed to be as confident as possible going into animation that the story is compelling, with interesting characters and enough conditional choice-based content to make the playable narrative impactful and meaningful. “The ultimate goal in the storyboard phase of production is to create a fully playable animatic of the entire game that we can playtest to get feedback. We brought on a team of storyboard artists to help with the task, but since many of us come from a real-time game-engine background and are used to working in 3D, we still wanted the freedom of being able to fly the camera around an environment to find interesting shots.”
Beyond The Greybox
“Since we’re not just building environments that are meant to be traversed through for gameplay purposes, but are meant to feel lived in for the characters that inhabit them, the details become more important than a simple cube-based, gray-box environment can convey. For certain key environments in the game, we knew that building them out in 3D first before we started on storyboards would be a huge speed boost for us to be able to communicate ideas downstream to different departments.”
Somewhere Between Storyboards and Set Scouting
A large portion of the cinematic content in Dispatch takes place in a superhero office, so the team knew that its layout would be critical to plan out and understand before they began creating the animated content within it. “So we opened up Unreal, grabbed a bunch of different assets (a lot of them from the POLYGON Office pack) and started to build out the layout. Before production on any final cinematic content had begun, we had already mapped out a lot of the details about the look and feel of the environment, which helped inform our decisions around what areas the characters would naturally run into each other, where they’d hang out, how cluttered different desks should feel, etc.”
“When it came to the cinematography in Dispatch, we wanted it to have a grounded, simplistic style that obeyed the constraints of live-action filmmaking. Building the entire office out in 3D allowed us to do virtual set scouts similar to how a director, cinematographer and production designer would collaborate to find the right shots for each setup on a film set. There were some moments in the story where we wanted to have more camera movement, something that is often hard to capture properly in 2D storyboards. In these instances, having the 3D sets blocked out was crucial to help us create previz that could communicate not just the staging, camera movement and timing, but also helped inspire small visual moments like a magnetic-powered hero trying to use a photocopier while random office items are sticking to them. These kinds of details help contribute to the world feeling lived-in and might not have happened if we had not had the pieces to play with right at our fingertips.”
Demo Scene Inspiration Strikes
Dennis shared that another example of an environment in the game where Synty assets were very inspirational is when the characters go to a fast food restaurant following a late-night bar fight. “The original reference was based on an In-N-Out Burger near my house, but when it came time to build the environment I realized it didn’t quite have the specific layout I was looking for. I opened up Unreal and started flying around the POLYGON Shops asset pack looking for a place to start. That’s when I came across the Burger Joint restaurant and realized it had a similar basic shape to what I was looking for.”
“From there, I started moving things around and created a large seating area to accommodate the needs of the scene. I added the characters into the environment and started blocking out ideas for how they could be staged. I was able to quickly dig through the library of assets and swap the tables out from modern, thin designs to the older-feeling chunky benches to capture a bit more of the vibe that felt right for the scene. Once I got the layout into a place where I felt comfortable that it could serve as a base for our concept and art teams to reference, I took a handful of screenshots and sent them off."
And now for some tips, tricks, and advice from Dennis and the AdHoc team!
Build an Asset Library That Enhances Your Creative Flow
“We have a lot of Synty packs that we use regularly at AdHoc. When you’re in a creative flow the last thing you want to do is have to go online and dig through endless marketplace storefronts for assets, so my philosophy is to just have a bunch of assets of all different types easily available so we never feel limited. On Dispatch we used assets for previz from the POLYGON series including City, Construction, Heist, Office, Shops and even the Gang Warfare packs fairly regularly. A lot of the folks at AdHoc are very visual thinkers and we often prefer to jump into Unreal and mock something up to communicate an idea as opposed to trying to pitch it verbally or by writing it out in detail.”
“I’m always on the lookout for the next Synty asset pack to drop and each time it feels like getting new toys at Christmas! Opening Unreal and being able to immediately build something that will make the game better feels like being a kid and having a treasure trove of different Lego sets to dig through to create anything you can imagine.”
Use Assets to Bring Your Ideas to Life Faster
Dennis shares that his goal has always been to minimize the amount of time between having an idea and being able to bring it to life. “Sometimes we dive in knowing exactly what we’re looking for and other times when we’re brainstorming an environment we’ll just scan through the assets in different packs and look for sources of inspiration. Either way, I want to be able to work as quickly as possible so I don’t get bogged down by the process.”
“Over the years I’ve found the best and fastest way to search through all our Synty assets is to have a top level folder in our Unreal previz project that contains all the asset packs underneath. When I’m building a scene I’ll simply go to that top level folder in the content browser and search for the object I’m looking for. For example, in the donut shop scene at one point I wanted a cash register so I just went to that top level folder, typed “register” and then watched as all the different types of registers from our different Synty asset packs appeared. I’ll scroll through and find the one that matches the size / vibe of what I’m looking for and drag it right into the scene.”
“I’ve come to realize that there’s an addictive hit of dopamine that I get as I’m typing the name of an object into the content browser since I never know exactly what I’m going to find. Sometimes it’s exactly what I was looking for and other times I’ll discover a different option that gives me an even better idea. It probably scratches some loot-box type itch in my brain that I’m not even thinking about.”
Advice and Lessons Learned
After nearly 20 years of working in the game industry, Dennis has learned that there is no “correct” way to work. “Everyone is different. The key is to try a lot of different methods and then find the one that works best for you. Some people prefer to communicate their art-related ideas to a team through verbal pitches. Others like to create top-down views of scenes to communicate basic shapes and character blocking. And others just want to draw rough thumbnails of specific shots in a scene to communicate an idea. I’ve tried all those ways and none of them really worked for me.”
“A big turning point in my visual storytelling career was learning Unreal and discovering Synty asset packs. Now I’m not only highly capable of creating complex environments out of the building blocks found inside the various asset packs, but it’s also something that I really enjoy doing so it turns a task that could seem daunting into something that I actually look forward to doing. This makes me more inspired to keep making things, especially as project scopes get bigger, deadlines get tighter and we continue to push the quality bar of the games we’re making. When you’re deep in production, anything you can do to keep yourself inspired and moving forward is a huge help, so I’m thankful to have discovered Synty so many years ago!”
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You can also check out our library of Made with Synty blogs for more developer interviews and incredible examples of what can be achieved utilising assets in your projects.
