Have a good day, dear followers!
The Rummy Games team is here to welcome you with the new Dev Diary.

Today VFX-artist Anastasia Medvedeva is in touch. She will talk about her experience of working on the Saturated Outer Space project during the last few months. We remind you that the last time Nastia talked about how she created the “swarm” unit in the Development Diary #14.

One of the most interesting tasks over the past couple of months has been the creation of a "shield" grenade, which should form a protective energy field with the help of lightning.
The first references were just an energy hemisphere or cube:

When creating this item, we focused on projects such as Halo or X-COM. But I wanted to add something new to this game mechanism. Therefore, the dome grenade will not only protect against the incoming damage, but will also have several more completely incredible uses. Unfortunately, I cannot write about these mechanics yet, I will have to wait for the official information about this mechanic.

And the first versions of a working grenade look like this:

Later, it was decided to add a mesh texture to make the shield fit more Sci-Fi rather than fantasy:

The mesh has a gradient and shimmer. The shield itself, in contact with any surface, outlines its contour. This is done thanks to the Fresnel and Panner material settings.

Later it turned out that the round shield is not quite what we need. In the end, it was decided to keep the cube version with the four separate mini-lightning generators, from which the shield appears.

The model of these generators was made in Maya, and the shield itself was made on Niagara plugin, which was described in the earlier diaries.

The components of the grenade look like this:

There are 4 of them, and they fly in different directions:

Lightnings out of them:

In the entire simulation, lightning turned out to be the most difficult, since they needed to set the right direction, choose the right length, thickness, oscillation and other parameters that for some reason did not correspond to Niagara editor and the game viewport. In addition, there were the largest numbers of them. There was also a lot of improvements on lightning, since sometimes the lightning bolts were too thick, sometimes too thin or very fluctuating.

The final setup looks like this:

And the type of grenade energy field approved for today is as follows:

After the appearance and disappearance of the dome, it was necessary to make it disintegrate upon the impact. And it will look the coolest - like a cell splitting:

Unfortunately, in the current version of the build, the grenade mechanics itself is still at the experimental level and players will not be able to get acquainted with it in the near future, but let's hope that by DevGAMM in May it will be already realized in the build open to use it.
The development of the project continues. If you are interested in it, add the game to your Steam Wishlist and be the first to know about the news and game updates. Until then, see you soon!