Arrivant · Professional
StarGarden
- Type
- Professional, Arrivant
- Focus
- Creature AI, creature abilities, animation; support on UI, gameplay systems, PCG and networking
- Stack
- C++, Blueprints, Unreal Engine, Behavior Trees, Utility AI, Gameplay Ability System
Project scope
- Game
- Multiplayer social auto battler focused on empowering human connections
- Status
- Unreleased
- My role
- Gameplay Engineer
- Dates
- Jan 2022 to Sep 2023, remote
What I owned
General engineering support with a focus on Creature AI, Creature abilities and animations. Supported UI, gameplay systems, and PCG.
Creature AI
- Created Behavior Trees with decorators and conditionals for shared NPC behaviors.
- Allowed flexibility in execution by using abilities to drive creature-specific behaviors.
- Hooked into the Photon networking setup so NPC behaviors and states were tracked across the network and stayed in sync.
Ability and targeting systems
- Created a rules-based priority targeting system, where each creature and its abilities could define rules to narrow down which enemy unit to target.
- Prototyped a generic ability system, then swapped it for the Gameplay Ability System (GAS).
- Created tools for designers to easily create and tune abilities.
Animation
- Created a choreography system that, under specific conditions based on the creatures involved, replaced killing blows with souped-up choreographed versions.
- Beyond killing blows, certain creature-on-creature attacks were also replaced with unique animations, adding variety and subtle storytelling to how these creatures interact with one another.
- Set up the animation blueprints for each NPC.
Startup support
- Being part of a startup meant jumping around a lot. I didn't own networking, game flow or UI, but I jumped in to help prop up features and squash bugs across them.