Technical Designer
Technical Designer
KORE is a 3rd Person Action/Adventure stealth game set in a New Orleans French Quarter inspired River Styx, with the core gameplay centered around obtaining a token through traversal and using powers to avoid detection by restless spirits trying to steal the token back. This was created in Unreal Engine 4 over the course of 30 weeks in a team of 17.
Designed and prototyped mechanics, integrating them into a system created by another technical designer afterwards. Created a custom locomotion system with procedural animations. Set up the animation state machines for both the player and a.i. Performed various instances of debugging and refactoring in others' work. Created tools to accelerate different parts of development.
Player Animation State Machine and Custom Locomotion
The basic animation state machine for the player. There are subtle changes to these simple states that make room for stopping animations, allowing for a smoother and more customized transition between idle and movement.
Additional animations and locomotion beyond the simple walk, run, crouch, and crouch walking. The custom locomotion more visible here is shown to help give weight to the character and cements the character as part of the world. Pivoting, leaning, turning the head to match the camera, turning in place when the head turns too far, and keeping the feet from sliding during the movement animations.
The customizable locomotion system controls the movement of the character down to the speed, acceleration, deceleration, rotation, and even the rotation rate of the character.
An addition to the custom locomotion system is this "Snap to Cover" system that allows the player to hide behind, move along, and peek around walls.
This uses a line trace to check diagonally from the movement direction of the player to check if there is a wall going forward. In addition, it adjusts the movement controls so that the character moves based on the player's perspective and not the character's perspective.
A simple state machine for the NPCs that included walk, run, and idle.
A scaled down version of the custom player locomotion was applied to the NPC mainly to keep the feet from sliding, to offset their starting positions when moving, and to turn the head to follow the player once they are close enough. Montages can also be seen playing during random intervals during the run, although they definitely do not look nice while turning.
NPC Animation State Machine and Custom Locomotion
Timed Input Mechanic
A simple mechanic where you have to press the correct input during a timed event. The amount of time between each event and the window of opportunity for the player to press the input gradually decreases with each success and is visually represented by the enclosing black UI bars in this prototype. The mechanic is easily adjustable, allowing designers to control over how quickly the break time and window of opportunity decreases.