Project Ascend Prototype
Project Description
Project Ascend was a three month prototype development cycle with a team of about 15 people. My role as a game designer had me creating the character blueprint and animation graphs, level blueprints, enemy AI behavior trees, custom gamemode with checkpoints, level manager, respawning system, and many of the environment layouts. I was also responsible for creating technical documentation on best practices and workflows as well as researching multi-user editing to create a process for everyone to collaborate and contribute. I gained a lot of knowledge on MetaHumans, combat design, level design, and behavior trees. My biggest contributions were creating the majority of the blueprints.
Dragon Enemy AI
The dragon enemy is one of the bosses in the game, he remains in the same position, but relies on his ice breath, claw strikes, and sweeps to deal damage to the player. The dragon is a child of my enemy boss class and has custom code that activates and deactivates specific damage boxes for specific animation montages. The dragon’s AI borrows from my general enemy AI. It has 3 behavior sub-trees, the most complex one is shown here, which covers it’s combat mechanics. I created several custom tasks to communicate with other parts of the game, as well as some custom decorators for random timings and dice rolls so he’s not as predictable.
Player Controller
This Blueprint contains all the code that handles the player character. White represents things that occur on begin play, green is on every frame. Everything in red is related to movement/combat mechanics. I also have a section in black which is all of the dev tools like flying, teleporting to checkpoints, force respawning, etc. This character needed controls for movement, sword combos, blocking, lock on targeting, rolling, pulling out/putting away the sword, interacting with objects/doors, etc. I also created a custom component that handles damage and healing.