Developers @Ephemera_Works is an indie studio started by four friends in Argentina, whose roguelike action RPG ‘Kernel Hearts’ sold over 100,000 pre-orders before launch. Hear from the devs on how they built it with core UE systems, and how Epic Online Services and Epic Games l team reach players 🧵

“GameplayTags is an Unreal Engine feature commonly used to manage complex gameplay elements like attributes or NPC behaviors that helps you avoid creating a bunch of Booleans. We do use GameplayTags for those purposes, but we have also found we can use this feature to communicate dpoints to provide very specific information.

Attack attributes are a good example: how we take a very strict approach when it comes to balancing each move, including how much each attack should regenerate magic, how much the enemy should be pushed away from the player, how much hitstop each different move should have, should an attack be unblockable, etc.

The best thing about using GameplayTags like this is how easy it is to expand the system without complicating our programming logic.” - Gonzalo Ferretti Da Silva, Lead Programmer

“In character action games, taking decisions on frame data is very time-consuming and, considering how much we iterate on the timing of the animations, being able to quickly modify cancel windows or when to enable the hitbox of the characters is very important.

Timers can do dvantage of Anim Notifies and directly place the triggers on the Anim Montages to be more specific about when we want to trigger an event, such as enabling a hitbox, casting spells, or the instruction to let the player cancel an attack into the next one.” - David Funes, Combat Designer

“When it came to designing our playable characters' movesets, we tried many workflows in the past, but it wasn't until we started using Data Assets that we managed to get a proper foundation to quickly iterate around the combo strings of each character.

In ‘Kernel Hearts’, the fferent moves with some common attributes, like attacks that fall from the sky or moves that will play a different animation only if the player managed to land a hit on their target. Hardcoding all these attributes for each animation is a mess, and not having shortcuts can cause a serious headache for the designers. A solid combat system that you can connect all the logic to and forget about what's happening under the hood makes the design process much more seamless and consistent.” - David Funes, Combat Designer

“Unreal Engine has provided modeling tools since the days of UE 4.2, but it wasn't until Unreal Engine 5.0 that we were able to truly take advantage of them for our project. As the sole level designer on a small team, I was able to leverage UE5's overhauled toolset to sculpt and the fly, addressing needs as they arose without relying on external software such as Maya or Blender.

Tools such as PolyCut and CubeGrid saved our team days of work alone by streamlining our workflow and allowing me to perform complex, customized mesh operations seamlessly and within seconds, whether during the blockout phase or while polishing final assets. These are only a few of the tools I relied on most heavily, but they illustrate how valuable UE5's integrated modeling workflow was to our production. Being able to make these kinds of changes directly within the engine allowed me to iterate quickly and effectively without having to interrupt the level design process by switching to external software.” - Alejo Regueiro, Level Designer

“The Online Subsystem has greatly facilitated our peer-to-peer (P2P) match handling and connection with platform features. As a small team, not having to deal with the boilerplate and minute details of each PC storefront or console platform integration is a god-send.

To improve sed Epic Online Services' (EOS) functionality to enable crossplay. This really expedited our implementation thanks to how easy EOS and the Online Subsystem EOS plugin integrated with other online systems.” - Gonzalo Ferretti Da Silva, Lead Programmer