Michael: the Archangel (Unreal)

2026-05-06 //

Combat prototyping

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.

Debug HUD overlay during PIE, showing live tunable state for movement, combat, and crowd coordination

Michael the Archangel, prototype gameplay

2026-05-12 //

Final Michael model & rig

Model, rig, and texture pass. Stylized hand-built model & rig in Maya, sculpting in Blender, textures out of Substance Painter. Up next: Unreal integration, with distance-matching locomotion using a hand-authored anim set to replace the capsule placeholder.