Production Post 8 : Particle Effect Vacations

I love implementing particle effects. So much. It relaxes me: after working on core systems, tearing my hair out over complex algorithms, and handling the responsibilities that come with being the lead programmer: making particle effects is practically a vacation. I just kind of zone out and mess around with sliders, values, and curves until things look pretty. I like making things in our game look pretty.

So I'm going to post a few gifs of some particle effects I've made, and briefly talk about them!

This was a pretty quick one to make, I wish I could have made the actual line thinner as it expanded, but that isn't how basic scaling works. The time it would take to make that work is more time than I'm willing to spend on something like that. Maybe when we get to pure polishing, but there are more pressing things to attend to at the moment.

There are two particle effects here: one when a boulder crumbles and another, more subtle fog/mist effect under the mountain. The boulder smashing was the first particle effect in the game, and I'm not particlary (heh) happy with it. The mist I made earlier today: a lot of stuff is happening with that but my favorite part is that as it rises, the second or third phase of transparency brings it slowly to zero alpha, which gives the illusion that it dissipates as it rises into the atmosphere.

I set the background dandelion effect to render as shadows on the same layer as the background, which I think looks really nice. If you notice, the dandelion tumbleweed thing actually effects the background dandelions! I attached a wind zone to effect the background particles, and a sphere trigger collider to impart a force onto the orbs. The dandelion ball obstacles aren't finished yet, but they look alright. To get them to fly around in a circle, I had to give it an x force over time as a sine wave, and a y force over time as a cosine wave. Circles! Everything is circles!

Ah Unity default particles. Maybe I'll change the texture of these to one of the smoke particles Shannon made, but then again... meh. I think this one looks pretty good. I do need to resize this: the ghosts used to be tiny, shitty hands until Amanda made them ghosts. So the effect would execute, and I destroyed the hand a couple split seconds after the effect started, which made it look like a smoke bomb kind of magic poof. You can see the ghosts disappear while the effect plays, and yeah me no like.

I'm looking through the game and, uh, I'm not seeing any more. That's really disappointing for me. I need to make more particle effects. Luckily, most of my tasks right now are particle effects now that the Overworld is done. Next week I'm thinking I'm going to spend a lot of time on these. It's going to be a good week :)