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Guides — Start Here, Designers

last-verified: 2026-07-10 against f9ebdc9a3

This section is the designer front door. The rest of Documentation/ explains how systems work (reference); these pages walk you through doing things. If a reference page gets too deep, come back here instead — each guide only explains the concepts you need for the step you're on, and calls out what you can safely skip.

The ability pipeline in plain words

Making a new ability is four steps, and only one of them is "in the tools":

  1. Design it on paper. Write a one-page design (an "Ability One-Pager") so the shape of the ability is agreed on before any asset exists. Templates live outside this documentation space, in the repo's Design/ folder — copy Design/Abilities/_TEMPLATE.ability.md and fill it in.
  2. Create the asset with the wizard. The Ability Workshop's guided create flow asks you for exactly the choices your one-pager already answered, then generates a valid ability Blueprint for you.
  3. Hand-finish in the Blueprint editor. The wizard does plumbing only. Animation montage, hit-event timing, visual/sound cues, and feel numbers are yours to wire by hand — the tutorial below shows how.
  4. Compose and play it. Put the ability into a kit with the Kit Composer, put the kit on a preset build, and press Send to PIE (Play-In-Editor — running the game inside the editor) to feel it in-game.

At every step, validation tells you what is missing: the wizard's blocker line names the next unmet requirement, and the Workshop / Composer validation strips are the live checklist. When in doubt, trust the validator over any document — including this one.

Guides

How-to recipes (short, task-shaped):

  • Hand-Finish an Ability — montage, hit-event notify, cues, feel constants: the checklist for step 3 above.
  • Register a Gameplay Tag — the tag pickers only show tags that already exist; this is how you add one.
  • Feel-Test Your Ability — playing your work in PIE, and when to reach for a balance sweep instead.
  • Author an Ability Chain — multi-link chains (slam → fissure → ticks) have their own, shorter flow: fill one Chain Sheet, run one command, hand-finish the links.
  • Author a Quest — from a quest design (sheet/CSV) through manifest, stamp, dialogue graphs, validation, and the overview map.

Where things live

Thing Place
Paper designs (one-pagers, kit sheets) Design/ folder in the repo (not on GitBook — it is a whiteboard, not documentation)
Chain Sheets — the one Design/ file a tool reads Design/Chains/ (see the chain guide)
Ability Blueprints you author Content/Gameplay/GameplayAbilities/ (the wizard picks the right subfolder)
Template abilities (TPL_*) — a working example of every ability base (ability shape) Content/Gameplay/GameplayAbilities/Templates/
Kits Content/DataAssets/Kits/
Preset builds Content/DataAssets/Presets/

Reference, when you want the deep end