Rune Mages – Spell Prototypes, Part 2
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The water spray is a low damage push-back spell that is supposed to be used to push away enemies that are to close to your characters. This was a short range spell, but was later changed to affect a longer and wider area. The problem I had while making this spell was that it was water, and to make something look like water is very difficult. I had no experience with shader forge at this moment and I had to rely on my particle system knowledge. This ment that the effect looked more like a ice or snow spray. It didn’t reflect any light which is a big part of water and it became very single colored. Another problem was the width of the spray. When water packs a punch it is often in a narrow beam and not a wide spray and that made our water spray look ineffective. I tried some variants of the water spray but they all had to be cone shaped so it became a difference in color instead of different effects. What I ended up with was a spray that had a strong narrow start but quickly grew in width. I added some droplets to emit at a slow rate from the spray to make it feel more like water. Then I copied this system twice and but one on each side at an angel to make the cone shape that was needed. Even though this was just a prototype I felt that I didn’t know how to make it better in the future since I was so limited by my own knowledge of shader forge for example.
The earth wall is suppose to make a cover for the player and to block the path for the enemies. The wall itself is a mesh and is animated to rise from beneath the ground when activated. Most of the effect was made by the animation of the mesh and this was a very straight forward effect and it just needed some dust and stones to fly away as it rose. This turned out to be harder then I anticipated since I had to match the effects with the animation. This might not sound so difficult but Unity’s animation system doesn’t always cooperate. To make the animation play as intended you have to go into Play-mode and activate it in the animator. But since the particle are mere children of the wall, they will play as soon as you enter Play-mode. You could make the wall start it’s animation instantly as well but this means that everything will start as soon as you press play. If This means that the scene have to load everything instantly and that makes it a bit laggy at the start, and then you won’t see how the effect really looks. All of the ment that to make everything match I had to do a lot of trial and error tests. The easiest way to see how it looked was to implement it into the game and cast the spell and see what needed to be changed. But I couldn’t test if the changes were good until we replaced the old prefab with the new one and played the game. This was a long and boring process and the result was barely worth it.  |
