Radiant Star: Overture

In the main game mode, you will be pitched against waves of giant enemies. Armed with only a shrink ray, you must avoid enemies while shrinking them. Once you are the biggest of the two, you can hit an enemy with a melee attack to finish them off.

To spice up the gameplay, during wave intermissions you can use the currency you earned during each attack to buy upgrades, recovery items, or character abilities to be used during combat.

Abilities and Ailments

The Ability and Ailment system is coded in C++ and handles all the logic behind activation, deactivation, cooldowns, target selection, and all other aspects such a system requires. It exposes all the necessary variables and events to blueprints so creating Abilities and Ailments can be as easy as creating a child blueprint and setting a few parameters.

Unique logic for new Abilities and Ailments can be created through blueprints by using intuitive exposed events. Abilities and Ailments can also work together via a simpler Ailment Ability Class, whose sole purpose is to apply Ailments, which can self-manage the rest of the logic.

Dialog System

The dialog system was implemented with the help of FlowGraph, a design-agnostic event node editor tool developed by Krzysiek Justyński. Using this plugin I built a simple but versatile dialog system capable of doing nonlinear branching narratives and cutscenes with the easy of use the FlowGraph editor provides.

New dialog scenes can be added to the game without any code through a simple and intuitive node editor. New types of nodes can be easily created through C++ or blueprints to extend the capabilities of the system further.

Menus & Controller Support

The game features full controller support with the help of Common UI. Epic Games developed Common UI for Fortnite to bring better UX experiences on multiple platforms, as of 5.3 Common UI is still an experimental feature. I created my own Subsystem to manage menus and Common UI to fit the design of my game.

Common UI documentation was a bit sparse due to being in an experimental stage, but with some effort, I was able to implement it. It was a great value add to the project due to its controller support and the ability to do complex multilayered UIs.

One good example of its power is the side "mobile" menu the player can access at any time during the game to interact with objects or special apps. This feature also allowed me to including a few debug tools into the builds that are also accessible with a gamepad.