Touch of Death

Overview

An HD-2D style game about a young hero who must befriend Death for a second chance at saving the world. I handled every aspect of this project solo — game design, Blueprint programming, level design, and narrative design — building it from scratch as a complete playable demo.

Game Design & Narrative

I used the Unreal Engine plugin Narrative 3 to build dialogue trees that require prerequisites, trigger in-world events, and initiate quests — giving the story real systemic weight beyond surface-level dialogue. The narrative goal was to create a world where the player's relationship with Death is the mechanical and emotional core of the game.

Blueprints & Programming

I coded the main character from scratch: movement, jumping, dashing, and attacking — all as a 2D sprite existing inside a fully 3D world. This HD-2D constraint required careful thought about collision, camera behavior, and how depth reads in a side-scrolling context.

Enemies received AI task trees. The most challenging system was the heart-based health UI — a visual representation of HP as discrete heart icons rather than a bar. The documentation for this kind of widget in UE5 was sparse, so I solved it through original problem-solving and iteration.