Project
Subject Zero: Benzene Protocol
Technical video demonstration — coming soon
Overview
Subject Zero: Benzene Protocol is an ambitious, hardcore FPS rogue-lite developed with Unreal Engine 5 and targeting a commercial release on Steam.
Players embody a death-row prisoner forced to act as a human guinea pig inside procedural, zombie-infested complexes. Every run is broadcast as a twisted reality TV show where the player must complete high-stakes objectives under the pressure of an infinitely scaling difficulty curve. Survival relies on tactical navigation across hexagonal tiles, extracting "Benzene", and managing a robust weapon modification loop.
As a Gameplay Developer on the project, my primary responsibility is to architect and implement the core gameplay systems. My main focus has been to design a highly scalable weapon and modification framework from scratch, leveraging the Gameplay Ability System (GAS) to ensure the game logic is clean, modular, and performance-optimized. I also bridge the gap between technical engineering and game feel by developing procedural animation systems and decoupled UI architectures.
What I built
Modular Weapon Architecture & Component Engineering
- 01
Weapon Manager Component: Developed a centralized inventory and weapon lifecycle manager handling weapon swapping, holstering, and dropping mechanics.
- 02
Weapon Factory Blueprint/Class: Engineered a specialized Factory system that communicates with the Weapon Manager to spawn both active weapon actors on the player and physical pickups in the world, optimized to only pass and serialize strictly necessary data structures.
- 03
Mod Manager Component: Created a dedicated bridge component responsible for linking the inventory's weapon mods directly to GAS, handling the activation and removal of mod logic seamlessly.
- 04
Recoil System Component: Implemented a standalone, highly tweakable recoil component to procedurally drive camera and weapon kickback, ensuring satisfying and responsive gunplay feel (3Cs).
Modular Weapon & Mod Framework (GAS)
- 01
GAS-Backed Core: Designed and engineered all core shooting mechanics (Firing, Aiming, Reloading) as Gameplay Abilities. Weapon properties (damage, recoil, fire rate) are tracked dynamically through Attribute Sets.
- 02
Custom Damage Calculations: Implemented specialized Gameplay Effect Calculation Classes to dynamically compute final damage, taking into account weapon stats, player buffs, and enemy scaling.
- 03
Event-Driven Mod Triggers: Utilized Gameplay Events to dynamically trigger mod behaviors (e.g., elemental procs, chain lightning, or stat boosts upon scoring a headshot or kill), ensuring a highly decoupled and reactive combat loop.
- 04
Dynamic Weapon Modification: Implemented a robust mod system where equipping different weapon mods applies real-time Gameplay Effects to alter weapon attributes natively within GAS.
- 05
Procedural Rarity & Scaling: Created an automated rarity system that overrides base weapon stats, modifying attributes and unlocking unique gameplay behaviors based on the item tier.
Data-Driven Architecture & Scalability
- 01
Primary Data Assets: Built a data-oriented workflow to define weapons, mods, mod pools and rarities. This allows designers to easily inject or tweak content without code-side recompilation.
Procedural Animations & Responsive 3Cs
- 01
Inverse Kinematics (IK): Developed a dynamic IK system to adapt character hand placement procedurally based on varying weapon meshes.
- 02
Procedural ADS: Engineered seamless transitions from hip-fire to Aim Down Sights (ADS), ensuring perfect sight alignment regardless of the weapon's custom mesh or active mods.
- 03
Sequencer Tweaking: Fine-tuned first-person animations directly within Sequencer to maximize weapon impact and gameplay responsiveness.
Optimized UI Architecture
- 01
MVVM Pattern: Integrated the Model-View-ViewModel framework for UMG to handle volatile data (Ammo counters, Benzene gauge, Health bars), completely removing heavy Blueprint tick bindings for optimal performance.