Student game | 1 semester | 16 person team

hyperfist

trailer and overview

Hyperfist is a first-person action combat game where you, a punk teen in a post-post-apocalypse, must drive off the robotic invaders to your home and deliver the most radical punch in the process.

This project is a multi-semester project, but I only had the opportunity to join for one of those semesters. In this game, I served as a 2D VFX artist, designing and animating sprites to be incorporated into Niagara systems in the game.

work reel

Onomatopoeia

Onos

The main brief for this game was to “deliver the most radical punch”. The key to doing this was in the comic-like callouts that appear with key impactful moments.

The first three callouts in this gallery spawn when the player punches any enemies. The BOOM effect is used when any enemies explode. The WHAM effect is used when the Bigwheel, a large melee miniboss, uses his ground slam attack.

Fuse

This is the animation attached to the fuse on the Blamm-0, a bomb-shaped enemy that explodes after a certain amount of time. The animation for its fuse is mapped onto a cone to prevent clipping, as a regular sprite would clip with the fuse on its head.

This animation is also reused for the jetpacks on Hyper.BO-55, the boss enemy for the game, by recoloring the sprite with Unreal’s material editor.

Muzzle flare and enemy alert

The muzzle flare animation is used by both the Drone and the Skullgunner enemies. The animation is short so that, when used by the Skullgunner for its minigun arms, the layering of the sprites does not become overwhelming.

The enemy alert plays whenever you enter the targeting radius of an enemy. It allows the player to know when an enemy is going to start trying to attack them. This also needs to be short, since it may become distracting with a large group of enemies on screen, but still eye-catching.

Ground slam

This is the animation used for ground slam attacks from both the player and the Bigwheel. In the case of the Bigwheel, the effect is recolored to be red and black using Unreal’s Material editor. When used for the Bigwheel, the effect is also scaled up and paired with the WHAM callout showcased earlier.