The evolution of a particle effect
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Hello! Today I am going to talk about my work on a particle effect in unity and how it developed through its making. This is going to be a shorter blog post but it will still cover everything that needs to be said about this particle system and how to develop them. I will start by explaining the reason for the particle effect and the purpose for it in our game, then I will go on to how it was developed and what iterations it went through to at last land on reviewing the effect. In the game there will be a character whos special attack is a form of chain lightning. If this character hits an enemy with this attack, all other players and enemies in base contact with the hit character will also take damage from this lightning. The game itself is grid-based and an enemy takes up 1 square, the particle effect in question is slighlty bigger than one square and will be placed over every square that is effected by this attack. So what you see in the gif above is one square of this attack, in the game this could be over more squares. Now starting of making the effect is as simple as just starting. I sat down and painted some, what I thought looked, cool lightning bolts in a sheet. What I mean by sheet is that I have 3 lightning bolts stacked over eachother and in unity I have enabled Texture Sheet Animation and put it on 3 i x-axis and 1 in Y-axis. This makes unity think the particle efefct is an animation, and will start at the one of the left most square of the sheet and continue de frame-by-frame animation, but since there is only 1 frame horizontally it does not animate. What I get is a particlesystem that randomizes which particle out of three it will choose. And the entire particle system in itself is only a big square with slightly randomized color between white and light blue, no speed on the particles in any direction and a quick lifetime. But it does this particle system look good? (the one to the left in the gif) Absolutely not! So it was time to start iterating it, of course I did not think it was going to look good the first try, so I expected it. So I started to think that the lightning bolts where perhaps not as cool as I envisioned, so for the next iteration I made new lightning bolts that where more like lines and I also made more of them in the sheet so that Unity had a larger pool of lightning bolts to choose from. I didn’t change much in the technical parameters other than the spritesheet. Now does it look good? No! So for the next iteration I thought that only adding more particles to the pool of particles to choose from is not going to make it better. So I set out animating every particle. Note that these animations where rough and jittery like I wanted them to be. So now the sheet has the same amount of particles to choose from but now it will animate them! This does look better but it is not looking good. I realized that it seemed I had different art styles on different particles so I set out trying to make them look uniform. (this is the second to last particle system in question) So now I had an animated particle system with much more particles than its ancestors and it was easy to say that it looked good, but only compared to the the ones before it. Still not being happy with the effect I set out to make entirely new lightning bolts (again). But this time with more aded realism, sharp white lines which fades to blue in the corners. I also added several bursts in the emission to make it spark even more as well as generally increasing emission and size and the result of this work is the furthest one to the right in the gif. Does this effect look good? Yeah I would say it is pretty decent. So let’s talk about the result. I think it looks good, but the most important thing to remember when looking at something that has gone through many iterations to not look at it compared to the ones before it, instead looking at it as a brand new item. I think this was the problem I had with the first four iterations, they looked like crap, but compared to the ones before they were good, which blinded me from seeing them for what they where. So what is the latest iteration? It is good, but I do think that I can go through some more iterations with it to make it really nice. – That’s all from me! – Sakarias ‘Rostfritt’ Ståhl  |
