AV HummingBird
- Gameplay Engineer and Designer, in charge of helping the design and programming the mechanics of the game which is right now the main movement controls of the mecha, using a custom player controller that is meant to replicate Gold Source style of feel and movement.
- Collaborating closely with other designers such as sound design to guide on how current sound effects should feel, such as weighty, mechanical, etc..
- In charge of the Git repo, making sure to handle any merge conflicts and set up other team memebers on the git.
- Team right now consists of 8 people, where we attend bi-weekly meetings to give updates on current tasks and progress.
AV HummingBird is an in-development project I've recently joined made in Unreal Engine 5. The gameplay will be a mix of Halo/Arena-shooters combined with Mecha style action. There will also be a strong, character-driven story told through visual-novel sequences when not fighting. The story, visuals and gameplay will be an homage to 90's Mech Anime.
Featuring a FPS-action focused gameplay with an emphasis in mastering movement, as the Mech can skate around, dash, double jump, combined with mastering the array of weapons and equipment the player can use.
Current progression of the overall game can be found on X, at: https://x.com/AV_Hummingbird
Project Responsibilities:
Under the Hood:

Another bit of early work, testing the movement feel of everything. In FPS games it's important to get the 'crunch' of moving down, and this includes subtle camera tilts, weapon sway when moving the camera and animation for walking. I used timelines, lerps and the animation blueprint to make procedural animation for walking, camera tilt and weapon sway.

Here I'm testing the limb system for our game, basically I scripted in Blueprints to set up individual limb health using a Map, finding the key based on a line trace that detects a surface physics material assigned to sections of the model and the top left of the screen is a debug to show what part the line trace hits. We feel the limb system will create interesting combat dynamics and encounters both for PVE and PVP, by trying to destroy parts of the body so the mecha has less functions, for example destroying the legs would cause the Mecha to leave skate mode or slow it down.

As our project develops, I always try to utilize the latest features from Unreal Engine. Here I'm testing out the Chaos Particles system, to create destructables, a very crucial element in Mecha games. I want to design the Mecha around the fact it's a giant metal machine that stands so high up it breaks through the clouds. Being able to crash through buildings at high speed I think would be awesome.
Here is an example of a join session network set up I created. I utilized RPC calls built into Unreal Engine to create a listening server session, creating the UI screens to host and join games while also a bunch of under the hood work to make sure movement and eventually shooting syncs up with a client and host. We want to have a fun and simple PvP mode where you can play with friends or others using Steam’s API, reminiscent of Halo: CE and Mech-Games to just jump in and start shooting each other. I also pitched some classic game modes we could design like a twist on capture the flag and oddball, combining them together (Capturing the enemy’s flag and essentially holding onto it the rest of the game until you reach the point cap for example.)