Reward Chest Material VFX

As an exploration of channel packing, I created and implemented a dynamic animated material to convey the item rarity of the post-dungeon rewards. The goal of my exploration was to push how many layers I can extract from a single texture and individually manipulate. In each of the RGB channels, I made squares of 3 different values. In the master material, I isolated each of those values in each channel, resulting in a total of 9 layers of entirely different squares to work with. To prove that each layer can be manipulated, I made each layer move at a different velocity in equal increments between a max and minimum velocity. Groupings of these layers are turned on as the rarity input increases.

UI/UX Navigation prototype - Editor Uitility Widget

I also explored creating my first Editor Utility Widget. While not complete due to changing design and reprioritization, I am proud of where I ended up. An Editor Utility Widget is a visual implementation of an Editor Utility Blueprint, a tool to customize your UE4 workflow in the editor. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of them before and was excited to see what they are capable of. I ventured to create a tool for designers to easily specify the explicit navigation between nodes of a complex, non-linear skill tree. The user selects a node and, going clockwise, defines the navigation in each direction by clicking on another node (or skipping that direction). The name/value of the selected nodes would be stored in a data asset. In final implementation, this data asset would be accessed in the skill tree widget to determine which node to navigate to when the player fires a directional input.

In the video below I explain some additional aspects of the widget while showing it in action.