Burning Knight

Burning Knight was a year long project that I made during my final year of university. It is a 3rd person combat system, where you use both sword attacks and fiery spells to defeat the undead enemies that threaten your city.

Inspired by games such as Sony's Spiderman and Activision's The Legend of Korra, as well as game ideas I had during my teenage years.

Itch.io link: https://lukemanga.itch.io/burning-knight-fyp

Why this project

I created this primarily as a showcase of technical ability, displaying my knowledge of Unreal Engine blueprints, actor interactions, enemy AI and blueprints, animation blueprints, save data, particle systems and level design. I wanted to create a proof of concept for my favorite genre of game (third person real time combat, usually in a fantasy setting)

What I learned

This project required me to further my understandings of animation blueprints, enemy AI and event interactions. This was also the first time I used save slots to keep track of when the player had first summoned the boss, so that if they die while fighting the boss they don't have to replay the level from the start.

What I enjoyed

The spells where fun to design and implement, suiting them to interact with the level and enemies in an intuitive way. I also enjoyed the design and creation of the level, seeing it increase in detail and atmospherics from a basic blockout.

Critical review

My main fault would be how I initially created the melee animations/ combat sequence (my initial methods made some of the animations a bit choppy, and made bug fixing more difficult down the line). Other things I would have liked to improve would be having a wider variety of sound effects, added camera shakes, and fixing the enemies to not start moving until their attack animation is fully completed.