Sanctum

Overview

Sanctum is an immersive, interactive photo gallery built in Unreal Engine 5.6.1. Users can walk through a dynamically curated world of their own images. Each session offers a unique visual experience, featuring shifting times of day and randomized selections. The gallery is calm—until it isn’t. If you break the rules, the guards take notice.

Why Epic Games’ Unreal Engine?

Sanctum leverages Unreal Engine’s power to create a personal, expressive, and technically ambitious project. The engine’s real-time lighting, AI capabilities, and seamless user asset integration made this vision possible. A MegaGrant would allow me to polish, optimize, and extend Sanctum into a shareable experience for creative users worldwide.

Who It’s For:

Photographers, artists, social media creators, and anyone with a story to tell through photos. Sanctum turns images into an experience—not just something you post, but something you walk through, interact with, and share in a completely new way.

Core Gameplay Features

• Procedural curation of user-supplied images (up to 1000+)
• Dynamic time-of-day system with lighting variation
• Silent AI guards there to enforce rules
• Optional weapon mechanics and player-driven escalation
• View-tracking for every piece of art across three buildings
• Simple folder structure for adding and swapping user photos

Walkthrough Video & Screenshots

🎥 Watch the walkthrough video and view in-game screenshots.

This media page shows exactly how the game works, how users can engage with the museum, and how your saved images are displayed and tracked during exploration.

What’s Next?

• Online photo-sharing between players
• In-game UI for importing and organizing images
• Multiplayer or guest visitation features
• Mobile and console optimization
• Modular gallery templates and community skins

About the Creator

I’m Datta Groover, a long-time game designer, creative developer, as well as a best-selling and award-winning novelist. I was a contributing designer on the original Age of Empires before Ensemble Studios sold that best-selling game to Microsoft, and later was a contributing designer on 3DO’s Heroes of Might and Magic IV. Over the years, I’ve led or co-led the design on more than 25 video game titles. With Sanctum, I’m combining my passion for visual storytelling, interactive design, and personal expression.

Download & Setup Instructions

💾 Click here to download the working demo (2.4 GB)

To set up:

1. Unzip the downloaded file
2. Open the folder and double-click RunSanctum.exe
3. To load your own images:
   • Navigate to: Sanctum/Sanctum/Content/Textures/
   • Place images into each of the three labeled folders (one per museum building)
   • Images should be max 1000px on the long edge and 8-bit color

Contact

If you have questions or feedback about this project, feel free to reach out:

📧 Datta (at) DeepPacificPress (dot) com