Elflock (LiA Internship) - NovaSphera Studio

UI, Input & Focus

• Rebuilt the menu flow with Common UI and Enhanced Input, bringing Figma designs into responsive widgets for inventory, dialogue, and interaction.
• Improved mouse, keyboard, and controller navigation across layered menus and popups, fixing lost focus, unintended cursor actions, and held inputs reopening menus.
• Refined inspection controls, dialogue speaker names and option icons, and control illustrations that respond to the active input device.

Settings & Keybinding

• Built graphics, audio, and control menus using MVVM, with temporary values, selective apply, and warnings for unsaved changes.
• Implemented dynamic key rebinding and multiple profiles through Enhanced Input User Settings and PlayerMappableKeys, supporting designer iteration.

Character Customization

• Worked on clothing, hair, headwear, and accessories with material and colour variants, plus rotation, zoom, and panning for inspecting selections.
• Separated widgets from character logic through a C++ ViewModel and gameplay-tag categories. Coordinated asynchronous loading of icons and static mesh, skeletal mesh, Groom, and Chaos Cloth assets.
• Connected equipped items and unlocked options to the save system, preserving appearance and customization progression.

Loading & World Readiness

• Worked on a Game Instance subsystem that tracks map and world initialization, player-controller availability, World Partition streaming, and shader pipeline precompilation to drive loading status and staged progress.
• Kept the loading screen visible during rendering warm-up, texture streaming, and mesh LOD requests, using resource-stability checks and a timeout to help avoid revealing an incompletely streamed scene.
• Blocked input and flushed held actions at transitions, switching shader precompilation to faster batches during loading and back to background processing afterward.

Minigames & Gameplay Integration

• Developed an item-placement puzzle system where players use collected objects to complete an arrangement, with placement rules, saved progress, and UI feedback.
• Supported mouse selection and controller navigation through the same gameplay logic, with controller focus automatically advancing after placement.
• Built reusable selection and highlighting components, keeping them separate from individual puzzle rules. Added configurable completion actions for feedback and customization unlocks.