Empulse is 1047's movement shooter, taking cues from Titanfall and Black Ops 3, and I built the technical UI framework the whole interface sits on — the core architecture, the tooling, and the conventions everything else gets written against. Movement shooters are a weird case for UI. The player's wall-running and grappling around at speed, so the HUD has to stay readable and hold frame while everything's flying past, and the menus and progression still have to keep up with a live-service schedule on top of that. Building the UI from scratch was also a rare chance to skip the usual mess — inconsistent widgets, UI logic welded into game systems, a front-end that only one or two people actually understand. I wanted a foundation the whole team could build on without tripping over each other, with the conventions set early enough that they'd actually stick.

I built it around a C++ core that handles the heavy lifting — data binding through our proprietary MVVM system, screen and layer management, cross-platform input, styling — and hands designers a clean, predictable surface to lay out screens and iterate in UMG. Shared base classes and a documented set of widget patterns mean a new screen ends up looking and behaving like all the others without anyone having to police it. I didn't want performance to be a cleanup pass at the end, either, so event-driven updates and careful invalidation keep the HUD and menus in budget even when the player's moving fast.

There's a leadership side to this one too. I'm the Lead Technical UI Artist on it, so a lot of my work is people rather than code — mentoring the UI/UX team, setting the bar the codebase holds itself to, and keeping things coherent between design and engineering as the game comes together. The real win isn't any single screen; it's that the team can keep building fast on top of this without it slowly turning into a mess.