VAELOR

Overview

Vaelor is a third-person melee combat game centered around fighting increasingly challenging versions of yourself in an endless combat loop. Built entirely in Unreal Engine 5 using C++, the project focuses on responsive action combat, enemy decision-making, and scalable encounter systems rather than relying on scripted enemy behavior.

The central design goal was to create enemies that feel less like predictable scripted NPCs and more like combatants making contextual decisions. Rather than using a fixed behavior tree sequence, the AI continuously evaluates the combat state and selects actions based on distance, health, threat level, punish opportunities, role personality, memory, and director-controlled combat conditions.

Combat System

The combat system supports light and heavy attacks, combo chaining, damage processing, directional hit reactions, invincibility frames, dodge mechanics, cooldowns, and perfect-dodge punish opportunities. Attack states are managed through a state-driven architecture that ensures responsive input handling while maintaining animation-driven gameplay.

Weapon Hit Detection

A custom weapon hit-detection system uses continuous box sweeps to track weapon movement between frames. This prevents missed hits caused by fast weapon movement during animation-driven attacks, and processes collision data including impact points, normals, hit components, and bones. The combat and collision architecture was adapted for a character whose weapon is built directly into the skeletal mesh, replacing the conventional externally spawned weapon-actor workflow.

Dodge & Defensive Systems

The dodge system features directional movement, temporary invulnerability, cooldown management, post-dodge recovery, and perfect dodge detection tied to an opponent's active attack windows — creating punish opportunities for well-timed defensive play.

AI Architecture

The AI decision system is built on a reactive utility-based architecture combining combat perception, threat assessment, combat memory, utility scoring, dynamic action selection, and role-based behavioral profiles. Enemies evaluate actions such as approaching, retreating, strafing, light attacks, heavy attacks, dodging, countering, and waiting — all scored against the current combat context.

Combat Archetypes

Five configurable combat archetypes define distinct enemy personalities:

• Aggressor — High aggression, close spacing, relentless attack chains
• Defender — Reactive, prioritizes blocking and counter-attacks
• Duelist — Balanced, adapts to player patterns
• Hunter — Maintains distance, exploits openings
• Coward — Retreats under pressure, attacks opportunistically

Each archetype is configured through Unreal Data Assets and role profiles that influence combat distance, aggression, attack preferences, reaction behavior, combo likelihood, and defensive tendencies.

Combat Perception & Memory

The AI includes a combat perception and threat assessment system that recognizes dangerous attack windows, recovery states, punish opportunities, and combat threats — enabling contextual decision-making instead of timer-based attacks.

A combat memory system tracks recent combat events and influences future enemy decision-making, allowing enemies to adapt their behavior based on what has happened in the fight.

Combat Director & Encounters

A Combat Director system manages combat pacing and coordinates enemy aggression, including limiting concurrent attackers and allocating combat resources. The wave spawning and progression system features dynamic role selection, budget-based enemy composition, escalating waves, scaling concurrent attackers, randomized spawn locations, and elite enemy modifiers.

The runtime elite system modifies AI behavior through temporary role-profile overrides, making certain enemies more reactive and dangerous without requiring separate enemy classes.

Player Systems

Integrated player systems include lock-on targeting with target acquisition, target cycling, automatic unlock on enemy death, camera interpolation, and dynamic camera distance adjustment. Supporting gameplay systems cover health, death handling, hit reactions, enemy movement, flanking, strafing, UI, animations, sound effects, and game presentation — all packaged and published as a standalone Windows build.