What Is Joint?
Joint Ecosystem refers to the products that are powered by Joint, a modular gameplay playback framework where you can declare, combine, stack nodes to create dynamic and responsive gameplay production.
One of the core products of its ecosystem, Joint Native, provides an ability to easily build up and manage very complex narrative & dialogue production that meets the needs of AAA game studios with Joint’s modular playback design.
Joint - Unreal Engine Modular Dialogue System
(Please understand that it’s an old showcase video and introduces Joint itself as a dialogue system - which is certainly much more than that as I told above!!)
What an Epic MegaGrant will do for Joint
Joint was a solid and well-performing project, but due to financial and practical limitations, it remained almost completely unknown. As a solo developer with very limited resources, I tried to maintain high standards for promotional materials, but that left me with little time or capacity to actually showcase the project publicly.
Although the system was a much more advanced and modular playback framework, I initially positioned it as just a dialogue system - something that affected how it was perceived. After spending years refining both the system and its ecosystem, I eventually hit a wall - both financially and emotionally. During that difficult time, I made some rushed decisions, like changing the pricing model abruptly, only to reverse them later.
It was in that state that I applied for the Epic MegaGrant - thinking of it as a last shot. Thankfully, Joint received a MegaGrant. and we now have the financial support we need. As I look to the future, I’m encouraged and have a renewed sense of purpose to keep going.
If you’re an indie dev like me - maybe struggling with a great tool or idea that hasn’t found its market - please consider applying for an Epic MegaGrant.
What’s Next After Receiving an Epic MegaGrant?
The entire MegaGrant will be used to further improve the product. I hope to either hire someone or find passionate contributors who believe in this project.
Here are just a few of the development goals currently on the roadmap:
Joint Native:
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Full MetaHuman Support We aim to make it extremely easy to integrate expressive narrative animations and voice systems with MetaHuman-based skeletal meshes - so that rich, dynamic characters can be used directly in the Joint Native dialogue framework.
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Writer-Friendly Tools We’re working on tools that allow writers to edit Joint scripts outside of Unreal Engine, through a standalone editor. The goal is to allow story designers and writers to work without needing to install Unreal Engine at all - while still syncing seamlessly with Unreal projects.
There are many more features in development, but most of them aren’t quite ready to be announced publicly yet. I appreciate your understanding.
A Small Call for Help
We're actively looking for developers and promoters who might be interested in contributing to the project. Since Joint is open-source and free for most users, we unfortunately can’t offer large financial incentives - at least, not beyond what’s available from the MegaGrant.
But if you're someone who loves meaningful, technically challenging projects, and wants to help shape a unique tool with potential to benefit many creators, we’d absolutely love to work with you.
Feel free to reach out: devgrain13@gmail.com
Thanks for reading, - DevGrain