The following is our latest blog, originally posted on July 22nd, 2016. To see our weekly updates first, register your account at the official Worlds Adrift website.
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In games, visual effects (also known as particle effects or simply VFX) are similar to music and sound effects in that they are essential to player experience, yet often forgotten about or left until late in development.
Particle effects are perhaps a little easier to iterate on than other parts of the game, which is a good thing since they’re reworked rather a lot throughout development as other visuals change. And sometimes, you can watch something happen in a game and have it just not feel quite right.
Here’s an example of how VFX can add life to an event:
This effect plays when a part is broken off a ship due to impacts or taking too much damage – this is just the smoke and sparks from the breakage, and doesn’t include dynamite or other explosions if they were the root cause of the damage.
When you start making particle systems in Unity (the game engine we use for Worlds Adrift) this is the first thing you’ll see:
Great, right? To start turning this into something other than miscellaneous white blobs, you need to head over to your Particle Editor which looks like this:
WHOOP! MORE FUN!
All of these dials and value fields definitely require experimentation if you want to create the right asset for a specific effect you have in mind. In addition, one of the best ways to get better is to look into how someone else did their effects. I first learned how to use this current implementation of the Particle Editor by buying one of the many Particle Effect packs from the Unity Asset Store, specifically the Cartoon FX pack.
When you find an effect you like, or is along the same lines as something you want, you can open it up and start playing with all of its stats to see how each one changes the outcome. Eventually you’ll get something that’s more like what you’re after. Here’s a look at the sparks and debris effect that is played in my example:
Here we have the debris, smoke, glow, and two separate spark effects. The separate spark effects are both the same in their look, but the second one has a slight delay and emits less than the first. This gives the sparks more of a “one two punch,” rather than just blowing all of the energy in one burst. You can also do this with just one spark effect, but it gets harder to manage the timing and scale of the particles, so keeping them separate is often easier to manage.
Anyway, GIFs are more fun than reading about particle systems so I’ll not go into too much more detail. There are lots of tutorials out there on particle effects but honestly I think just experimenting yourself is the best way to learn.
As well as the particles themselves, there are other effects that can enhance the VFX. In the first GIF above I included some camera shake and a flash of white over the screen. These are applied to the camera elsewhere in the development team, but also play a big big part.
I’ll leave you with two great videos about the impact of effects on game feels:
Juice it or lose it – a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho
https://youtu.be/Fy0aCDmgnxg
Secrets of Game Feel and Juice | Game Maker’s Toolkit
https://youtu.be/216_5nu4aVQ
Iain
Artist
@gillespionage