Michael: the Archangel (Unreal)

Here’s where the build is at right now. Michael’s locomotion and combat are running off the new hand-authored anim set, no more capsule placeholders. Early enemy AI is in, driving combat behavior against him. Engine side: a Lyra-style thread-safe AnimBP and an anim-driven combat pipeline, all the moment-to-moment feel I’ve been dialing in over the last few weeks. Animation authored in Maya, rigs built with Kinematic Solutions.

Here’s a little showcase of the animations I made for the game. Heavily inspired by UPA and Hanna-Barbera animation styles. Walk cycles, run cycles, attacks, combos, hit reacts, and death animations have been my concentration these past few weeks as I dial in the moment-to-moment gameplay feel. Lots of back-and-forth between gameplay engineering in Unreal and animation tuning and polish in Maya. I hope you enjoy!

Michael: Our main hero. The Archangel, the celestial high priest, the weigher of souls, and the great adversary of Satan.

Dybbuk: The restless soul of a dead sinner that attaches to and possesses a living person.

Model, rig, and texture pass. Concept, modeling, texturing, and rigging all by me. Modeled the base shape in Maya, sculpted in Blender, textured in Substance Painter, and rigged with Kinematic Solutions’ Fabricator. Next up: Unreal integration, using motion matching plus hand-authored animation sets for Michael (and the enemy character), then swapping out the capsule placeholders.

Three pillars landed. Tuning pipeline: every system exposes its values through a Data Asset, a console-variable override, and an on-screen debug HUD, so nothing waits on a recompile. Anim-driven combat: hit windows and chain timing live on the animation timeline (UAnimNotifyState_HitDetect), not in C++ tick code. Thread-safe AnimBP: Lyra-style snapshot pattern. Game-thread C++ writes UPROPERTYs, AnimBP reads them on a worker thread. Scales to crowd combat. Hand made placeholder animations for the capsules.