Berserker Girl

Team Size: 2 (1 Artist & Game Designer, Engineer) | Duration: 6 months

Published Steam game where I architected and integrated multiple complex UE5 systems (Survivor Template, ALGS, NavUI) as the solo engineer on a 2-person team

Unreal Engine
C++
Blueprint
git

Project Overview

Berserker Girl is a project that I picked up in Game Creators Camp, where I worked with an industry-professional animator who also contributed as the game designer. Since this was a 2-person project and we had a goal of releasing the demo as soon as possible, we decided to utilize existing plugins such as the Survivors Roguelike Template

My Contribution: Systems Integration & Technical Architecture

As the solo engineer on a 2-person team (1 engineer + 1 artist), I was responsible for researching existing systems in the market and integrating them to ensure they worked together seamlessly. The designer provided three main requirements:

  • Integrate the Survivors Template
  • Utilize Epic Games’ Game Animation Sample System to enable extensive animation sets
  • Ensure full gamepad compatibility

System Integration Architecture
What I Learned

System Integration Architecture

Core Systems Integrated

I architected the integration of three major third-party systems, each with its own complexity:

1. Survivors Template

  • Base combat and progression framework
  • Enemy spawning and wave management
  • Player upgrade systems
  • Health and damage calculation

2. ALGS (Advanced Locomotion System) Game Animation Sample

  • State machine for character movement
  • Animation blending and transitions
  • Root motion handling
  • IK (Inverse Kinematics) for realistic character placement
  • Advanced parkour movement states

3. NavUI (Controller Support)

  • Cross-platform UI navigation system
  • Input mapping for keyboard + controller
  • Context-sensitive menu navigation
  • Seamless input device switching

Integration Architecture

The complexity came from making these three independent systems work together as a cohesive whole:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│         Input System (NavUI)            │
│    Keyboard + Controller Management     │
└──────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
               │
    ┌──────────┴──────────┐
    │                     │
┌───▼────────────┐  ┌────▼──────────────┐
│ ALGS Animation │  │ Survivor Template │
│   Locomotion   │◄─┤  Combat System    │
│  State Machine │  │  Enemy Spawning   │
└────────────────┘  └───────────────────┘

Integration Example:

Added AC_Combat component which handles the custom montage animation for the “Ultimate Ability” in-game, which I added as a component to handle the animation and weapon tracing.

Blueprint integration layer showing custom combat montage system working alongside ALGS animation states

What I Learned

Technical Skills Developed

Systems Architecture

  • How to evaluate and integrate third-party systems effectively
  • Designing communication layers between independent codebases
  • Balancing extensibility vs. tight coupling in system design

Working with Third-Party Systems

  • Working with commercial UE5 marketplace assets by reading public documentation and joining Discord servers to learn from others’ implementation challenges
  • Understanding when to build custom vs. when to integrate existing solutions
  • Debugging and modifying third-party Blueprint systems

Future Improvements

Vertex Animation & Custom Pathfinding
Unfortunately, we were not able to add this to the current shipped version, but our goal was to have a massive number of enemies using Vertex Animation to optimize performance and custom FlowField pathfinding for enemy movements. This is still on my list of technical improvements for the future.