Project Hemorrhage

Semester long combat design project. We created a vampire themed combat system with melee attacks, spells & abilities, enemies, and a boss fight. All featured in a showcase level.

  • Team of 5 designers & 1 VFX artist.

  • Created using Unreal Engine 5.

  • We utilized the Gameplay Ability System (GAS) for certain areas of the project.

  • We used a great sword animation pack as a starting point

My Contributions

My work was focused on creating Vampiric spells / abilities, mainly the Blood Idol ability:

  • The Blood Idol disables an enemy for a duration of time

    • Enemies can’t move or attack while disabled

  • The Idol also allows players to preform finishers on disabled enemies with low health for an instant kill.

  • I created the ability using a combination of GAS and standard blueprints.

I also contributed the following:

  • Setup GAS for the project overall

    • Used for key player and enemy values such as Health, Blood (mana), and key ability values (cool downs, mana costs, etc)

  • Helped balance combat through a hits-to-kill perspective

Iteration 1

The first version was focused on getting the core components setup:

  • Setting up GAS, creating some key attributes like Idol health, cost, & cooldown length.

  • Creating a GAS ability for the idol and activating it.

  • Creating a reticle to aim where the idol will be spawned

  • Spawning the idol actor itself.

Iteration 2

The 2nd version focused on the enemy AI logic to disable the enemy.

  • The GAS ability spawns the Idol which applies a tag to the enemy. Once the tag is applied, the enemy plays an animation and enters a different state in its behavior tree.

Blood Idol Breakdown

The Idol ability logic is broken up into 5 main parts:

  • The Gameplay Ability

    • Aiming the reticle, checking for valid spawns, spawning the Idol.

    • Animations for the player casting, calling SFX & VFX events

    • Handles any cancelations or interruptions while the player is aiming.

  • The Blood Idol blueprint

    • Finding / detecting nearby enemies

    • Applying the disabled gameplay tag

  • The main character blueprint

    • Player input, events for post processing / camera effects

  • The main character animation graph

    • Blends the aiming animations with normal locomotion

  • A data table of GAS attributes

    • Contains the values for blood (mana) cost, disable duration, cooldown time, and more.

Final Version