GAME DESIGNER

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PLAYABLE CHARACTERS

Izanami

  • Boomerang Basic Attacks: Unique projectiles that travel straight, then home back to their instigator upon hitting max range or geometry, with dynamic damage scaling based on homing status, single-instance item effect triggers, and finally self-destruction on return for a true boomerang throw & catch effect.

  • Dynamic Projectile Speed Scaling: Retrieves attack speed attribute from the ability system, clamps it within a defined range, calculates a percentage-based speed modifier to dynamically adjust the speed of the projectile movement component of both her normal Basic Attacks and 'Sickle Storm' attacks.

  • Stacking Bleed Gameplay Effects: Calculates damage by capturing a scaling attribute via the ability system, retrieving ability level, and querying base damage and scaling coefficients from a curve table. It then accesses the target’s ability system through effect context to determine active gameplay effect counts, dynamically increasing damage and rewarding players for successive hits within a set timeframe.

  • Adaptive Health-Driven Passive System: Listens for health attribute changes to calculate a dynamic buff that rewards sustained combat by tracking damage values & timestamps in a custom struct, accumulating percent-max-health damage taken with a 10 second history record. Gameplay effect magnitudes scale based on this history record, specifically persisting through health gains to incentivize high-risk, back-against-the-wall engagements while maintaining balance through clamped values.

Achilles

  • Expanding Cone-Based Crowd Control & Damage Ability: Deploys a flat, cone-shaped area with two distinct attack zones—an instant short-range cone that applies crowd control (Stun) and full damage, and a growing long-range cone that expands outward as a traveling collision area, dealing reduced damage. Attack result is managed via gameplay tags, ensuring correct effects apply based on target type and cone hit zone. The deployable tracks hit actors in an array to prevent repeated effect applications, dynamically adjusts damage based on Achilles' Armor state, and retrieves level-based coefficients from curve tables for precise scaling. Final damage is set via caller magnitude, ensuring efficient and adaptable effect application with minimal Unreal assets.

  • Dynamic Self-Buff with Adaptive Scaling & Conditional Healing: Applies a timed self-buff that increases multiple attributes, dynamically recalculating when external attribute changes occur—while preventing self-stacking via asynchronous task management. Tracks ability-based damage events using gameplay tags, granting capped self-healing per hit to encourage optimal ability usage within the buff window.

  • Chainable 8-Way Dash & Attack Combo: Executes a directional movement ability (Dash), seamlessly transitioning into the targeting stage of a follow-up stab attack. If specific conditions are met on at least one target hit by the stack attack, the system automatically swaps back to the dash ability, enabling a second chained use, creating a fluid, adaptive two-stage combat mechanic.

  • Ultimate Dash & Execute Mechanic: A charged dash attack that checks if hit targets have a specific gameplay effect, which is dynamically applied to low-health enemies through a real-time sphere overlap check. The system tracks and updates in-range low-health targets, ensuring the effect is removed if they heal or move out of range. If a target still has the effect when struck by the dash, they are instantly executed instead of taking damage, creating a high-impact, condition-based finisher.

Cabrakan

  • 3-in-1 Ability Utilizing Swapped Equipment & Passive Listeners: A normal and enhanced cone attack that dynamically swaps based on a shield charge mechanic. Taking damage applies a stacking gameplay effect, tracked via passive listeners that count active stacks. Once fully charged, the system swaps in the enhanced ability, which deals more damage and stuns. Swaps are blocked if a cooldown effect (verified via gameplay tags) is active or if the other version of the ability is mid-firing sequence. If blocked, the system queues the swap and triggers it via a gameplay event when the attack sequence ends.

  • UI-Integrated Passive Meter Widget: The shield charge system updates a Widget Blueprint via gameplay effect-driven events, displaying charge count, cooldown status, and charge duration. Charge count is pulled from gameplay effect stacks, cooldown is validated through active gameplay tags, and charge duration updates in real-time—providing clear, real-time feedback to support the unique 3-in-1 ability.

  • Channeled Ability with Refire Burst Mechanic: Continuously fires and repeatedly commits costs while channeling. Once channeling begins, this ability enters a refireable stage which allows the player to cancel the channel for a single powerful attack, consuming a greater cost and triggering a longer cooldown for a risk-reward tradeoff. Simply cancelling the channeled ability instead of refiring only applies the shortened cooldown.

  • Modular Deployable Wall System with Conditional Refire: Spawns five independent player-blocking walls in a semi-circle formation, damaging enemies caught inside. Each wall is a deployable actor with an ability system and health attribute, displayed as pips (1 hit = 1 pip lost). Incoming damage is clamped to 1, except from the original instigator (Cabrakan), who can instantly destroy his walls. After firing, the ability enters a refireable stage, allowing the player to collapse all walls instantly if reactivated before they are destroyed. If walls are destroyed by damage, the refire window ends, and the ability respects its normal cooldown.

Hua Mulan

  • Mulan’s Evolving Abilities System in SMITE 2: Mulan features abilities that evolve based on damage dealt per ability, tracked through a passive listener system. The programming team ported this tech from SMITE to SMITE 2, exposing its functionality through Blueprint-accessible nodes. This allowed me, as a Designer, to expand upon the system, integrating it further into her abilities and ultimate using visual scripting.

  • Enhancing Mulan’s Ultimate with Evolution Mechanics: I expanded the Evolution System to her Ultimate ability, which cycles through her weapons.

    • Evolved Sword: Unlocked directional control during her dash attack, allowing up to 90-degree rotation, managed by modifying movement constraints.

    • Evolved Spear: Extended enemy ability lockout by retrieving active cooldowns of hit targets and adding to their current durations.

    • Evolved Bow: Increased projectile speed on its initialization by adding to the initial speed of the projectile movement component.

  • Unique Auto-Replenishing Consumable System: See Training Grounds in ITEMS section below for details of the Consumable itself. Upon use, the item is removed from her inventory and commits a Cooldown. When the Cooldown Gameplay Effect expires, a Passive Ability attempts to re-add the item, but if her Consumable Inventory is full, the system listens for inventory slot changes and automatically backfills the item when space becomes available.

Thor

  • Designer Handoff: Thor was part of a small number of Gods that were initially prototyped by another designer, and handed off for polish and release. My role as taking over as the Designer for Thor was to ensure that the Design team exceeded standards set by his fluid gameplay in SMITE 1, and that the cross-discipline teams were aligned and able to execute a “strictly better” version of Thor.

  • Reusing Boomerang Tech with Refire-Based Teleportation: The Boomerang Tech, originally developed for Izanami, was repurposed for Thor, enabling his hammer to return as a homing projectile. With this tech being so core to Thor’s gameplay, it made perfect sense for his development to be handed off to me, as I fully owned Izanami’s development in SMITE 2. Expanding on the Boomerang, a Refire mechanic was implemented, where, upon activation, Thor teleports to his hammer location and skips to a new montage section, seamlessly transitioning into a teleport-and-catch sequence.

  • Important Refinements: After Thor’s prototype and handoff, there were a few important refinements I had a hand in:

    • Thor has a spinning ability, where he hits enemies around him twice in a sphere, and then once more in a cone in front of him. It was important to implement a tracking system that captured the firing instance of this ability, and tracked the number of times it had hit per target, preventing abuse cases where the player could spin their character around during the abilities firing duration to gain extra hits.

    • Thor leaps into the air with his Ultimate, and subsequently aims his landing. It was important to manage a restricted camera pitch during this aiming sequence, and to apply a temporary gameplay effect to himself that reveals any enemies within line of sight, regardless of distance.

ITEMS

Training Grounds places a Deployable, which initiates a separate BP Tick Task that casts to the deployable’s gameplay ability, passing in the necessary variables to apply its passive effects.

On each tick, we iterate through an array of the instigator’s teammates, retrieving both their relative distance from the deployable (as a vector length) and a boolean value that determines whether they are facing the deployable. This boolean is calculated by obtaining the teammate’s forward vector and relative location difference, then using their dot product to determine whether the teammate is facing the deployable.

Once these values are passed to the deployable, a function is called to apply (or remove) the appropriate buffs based on the teammate’s relative distance and facing direction.

Gilded Arrow has a Passive Ability with a looping timer that triggers an event. On this event, as long as the item is not on cooldown and the owner is not dead, it:

  1. Finds all nearby actors that meet the specified Character Type filter, using circular targeting, and returns an array sorted by proximity to the owner's location.

  2. Iterates through this array of actors, checking each actor's current health percentage. If an actor at full health is found, it is set as the target actor, and the loop breaks, skipping to step #4.

  3. If a new highest health percentage is found during the loop, it is set as the best potential target to be marked.

  4. Upon completion of the loop, the Gameplay Effect is applied to the selected actor, marking them, and the ability cooldown is committed.

If a marked actor is killed specifically by the mark’s instigator, the aforementioned Gameplay Effects are applied to the instigator.

Sharpshooter binds to a pre-built "On Adjust Damage" event, allowing us to intercept damage calculations and apply our own adjustments. When this event is triggered, we first ensure that the damage source is a Basic Attack and, using Distance2D (Vector), verify that the owner's location and the target's location exceed the set distance breakpoint. If these conditions are met, a coefficient multiplier is applied in real time to adjust the damage value accordingly.

Additionally, this item listens for changes to the Gold attribute. If the change is triggered by a Kill or Assist event, and the attribute's new value is greater than its previous value, the item adjusts the magnitude of the outgoing gameplay effect spec that grants bonus gold, scaling it based on a percentage of the gold attribute change.

Gem of Focus (and its counterpart, Tekko-Kagi) bind to "Ability Fired" events. When this event is triggered, we track the firing instance of the ability. If this instance is new, we check whether the ability contains a gameplay tag that prevents items from triggering upon its activation. If no such restriction exists, the aforementioned gameplay effects are applied.

To maintain balance, some item effects should only trigger once per ability instance, preventing abilities that fire multiple times per use from unintentionally applying excessive gameplay effects. Additionally, some abilities may be explicitly blocked from triggering item effects via gameplay tags. For example, an ability with a very low cooldown or cost may be restricted to prevent it from triggering items excessively.