Ling and the Corrupted Hollow is a third-person puzzle-platforming game where players use adorable animal spirits to explore the beautiful Hollow Woods. Possess and control the world around as you search for the soul shards to cleanse the corrupted Tree and restore balance to your home.
Team Size: 26 | Engine: Unreal Engine 5 (C++ and Blueprints) | Role: Gameplay Programmer
Developed core player movement mechanics in collaboration with a designer to refine gameplay feel and responsiveness.
Implemented core gameplay systems for possession and extraction, enabling players to deploy “Ghosties” to control environmental objects and later retrieve them to reset object behavior.
Designed and developed the complete Ghosty AI system, including player-follow behavior, object possession logic, and state transitions between follow and possess.
Collaborated with design to implement and trigger sound effects across gameplay events and environments.
Integrated player animations and selected VFX assets in collaboration with artists to ensure correct in-game behavior and timing.
Assisted in resolving UI scaling issues by working with another programmer and designer to ensure consistent layout across resolutions.
Collaborated with programming and art teams to integrate visual assets into UI elements.
The core player movement system was built using Unreal’s Character Movement Component as a foundation. Standard mechanics such as walking, running, jumping, and double jumping were initially taken from the component’s default functionality, but were later modified and tuned to better fit the feel and pacing of the game.
During development, the movement system also included ground dashing and air dashing mechanics. These were fully implemented and tested for a significant portion of development before eventually being removed to slow down the game’s pacing and better align with the overall design goals.
I also prototyped additional traversal mechanics such as climbing and Assassin’s Creed–style beam jumping. These prototypes worked technically but were cut early in development for several practical reasons, including pacing concerns, limiting the total number of mechanics in the game, managing development workload, and prioritizing features that needed more care and attention.
The game features a mechanic where the player can use tiny creatures called "Ghosties" to possess and control certain environmental objects.
The Ghosty behavior is driven by a simple state system implemented using enums, which controls transitions between following the player, moving toward a target object to initiate possession, and remaining in the possession state while attached to an object. The simple design made the system easy to maintain and debug while fulfilling the design requirements.
I implemented the core possession and extraction mechanics that allow the player to send Ghosties into certain objects in the environment. When a Ghosty possesses an object, the object can perform specific actions such as moving, rotating or other actions. The player can also extract Ghosties from objects, returning most of the objects to its default state and allowing the Ghosty to resume following the player.
The system also included a command mechanic where the player can command the ghosty that was possessing an object to do the certain action, mostly move from point A to point B that was chosen by the player. This was cut for scope reasons.
I collaborated with an artist and a programmer to add animations to the player character. I utilized the animation blueprints, animation blend spaces tools provided by Unreal Engine to implement majority of the animations in the game that would change based on the player's state.
I also played around a little with control rig in Unreal Engine to add some details like the player's feet bending or twisting when going up the moving on a flight of stairs or ramps but that was not used because of various reasons like time constraint and other priorities.