Rune Mages – Spell Prototypes, Part 1
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A few weeks into the project I had got a hang on the particle system in Unity and we had decided what kind of spells that were going to be in the game. This ment that I could start prototyping these spells as particle effects. Our spells were divided into three groups; one rune spell, two rune spell and three rune spell. For our alpha test we wanted to have the one rune spells ready since they are the simplest and most basic spells in the game. These one rune spells are; firebolt, water spray and earth wall. Just by hearing the names of the spells I got a good idea of how they were going to be designed, but I also had to consult our programmers to know the effect area of each spell. For example how wide the earth wall and the water spray was going to be mechanically. Some other visuals was also discussed even though they didn’t affect the mechanic. We discussed how tall the earth wall was going to be to match in mechanics of increasing miss chance and not blocking an attack entirely. When all the mechanics of the spells was done I could start prototyping. I started with the firebolt, and I wanted it to be a small, fast, intense ball of fire that had a trail of fire and smoke. I started by making the actual ball by making a pulsing light in the middle that was embraced with fire from a sprite-sheet. I then added some embers to make it look more like a fire. This was the easy part but then I had to make the trail. The particle system in unity have a function called trail but it can’t animate sprite-sheets. This made the trail super stiff so I had to come up with a new idea. When I felt satisfied with the trail I made a copy of it to make the smoke trail. This trail had to be longer and have another animated sprite-sheet. But to change these things I only had to increase the lifetime of the particle and change the sprite-sheet. I also changed to color and the opacity of the particles to make the look more like smoke. To test if the trail worked I just had to grab the parent of the firebolt system and drag it around in the scene. And after some tweaking of minor numbers in the systems I ended up with this first prototype of the first spell in the game.
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In the Emission tab of the particle system there are three different settings, Rate over time, Rate by distance and Burst. The default one is Rate over time which emits a set number of particles per second. This is useful in basic particle systems and it is what I used when doing the actual ball in the firebolt, but for the trail I used Rate by distance. This emits a set number of particles per distance unit traveled and since out bolt will be moving this is perfect. This emission system requires that simulation space is set to world or else it won’t know that it is moving in the world space. This also means that the particles won’t follow the emitter but will instead animate in the on the coordinates it was created. This meant that I could make a particle system that is a child to the firebolt and make it emit particles as it moves around in the world. I therefor had the same control of the trail as a have of any other particle system. I could have a sprite-sheet fire animated as a trail and I could give it gravity and change size over lifetime.