SpiritBound

Overview

SpiritBound is a 3rd person 3v3 MOBA, where the player must eliminate minions, players and monsters to upgrade their characters in order to beat the enemy team. This project is a solo project where I have learnt how use many core systems in order to create a prototype online MOBA.

Process

Development of SpiritBound followed an iterative prototyping approach, in which individual systems were built, tested in the Unreal Editor’s multiplayer preview mode, and refined before the next system was introduced. The project began with the core character and health component architecture, establishing the replication foundation that all subsequent systems would depend upon. From this base, each major system: minion spawning, tower combat, hero abilities, the economy, and the HUD were added incrementally, with multiplayer correctness verified at each stage using a two-client PIE session. This approach allowed networking issues such as incorrect authoritys, unreplicated variables, and client-server timing mismatches to be caught early in isolation rather than compounding across multiple systems simultaneously. Where systems proved too complex to implement correctly in a single pass, such as the player spawn system and the lobby data persistence, they were revisited and redesigned multiple times until a working solution was found. The iterative nature of the process meant that the game was in a partially playable state throughout most of development, which aided both debugging and design evaluation.

Tools

Unreal Engine 5, Jira, GitHub, and Trello were used throughout development to support production, collaboration, and version control.