3/2 review
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For the duration of this last sprint i have spent a considerable amount of my time faffing about in various parts of the unity inspector wherein i’ve been working quite a lot with unity’s particle system Shuriken. I have for one been working with modifying or already extant ambient particle system to make it appear all across the level as well as changed and experimented with a handful of other settings. But enough filling out the word quota, the asset i’m gonna write about here is the particle effect i have created is an explosion of “spores” from our newly implemented “interactive sea onions.
We have reached the stage in our production where we have begun adding environmental decoration to our level to liven up the areas to avoid the player getting bored, they particularly ran the risk of this happening in the opening stages of the game where no enemies have been introduced, and during this week’s playtesting we had only implemented the, at the time, non-interactive onion and noticed that a lot of players would stop to investigate them and try to interact with to elicit some form of reaction to little success. So the group decided that onions needed some interaction to reward the player for taking their time and interacting with the environment. The result of that decision is the asset that i’ve created this past week. Since the particle effect would contain a large amount of small particles i made the particles rather quickly, only really caring about the fact they shared their color palette with the onion. Afterwards if added the particle the my newly christened onion spore particle system and started playing around with different emission shapes. I initially planned to have the particles eject in a cone and then expand into a half circle but soon realised that would require more time than i was willing to spend as well as knowledge of shuriken that i don’t have. The result ended up being the spores ejecting in 3 burst within quick succession of each other in the shape of a half circle and then fading rather quickly.
A surprise i encountered was the fact that shuriken and unity don’t really support completely 2d particles which meant that all the particles had a varying z axis which created the illusion of depth. If we’d wanted to make the particles to have exactly the same z value, it would have been necessary to create a script that would set each particle’s z position upon creation. That seemed like an unnecessary amount of work since we didn’t find the depth effect entirely unappealing.  |
