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Hi folks, Kaye here, back again to give you another instalment of our exciting art process! This week I'm going to introduce you to my exciting life with particle systems.
Now, before I get started let me just give you some background information on why I was working with these particular particles. The particles I've been working with are going to be used to represent the concept of data flow. They're generally used for aesthetic purposes for the time being but they hold potential for a lot more as development continues. They do ultimately work as a sort of basic guiding system for the player at the moment as the data always flows in the direction towards the final portal but they also hold the potential to pose as a life threatening obstacle for the player throughout the game. So with that in mind, lets get to how I've gone about creating this.
I initially did a few mock ups on how I wanted it to look within the level.
But you can only really do so much with a concept, to really see how well this is gonna work out I need to tweak it in game. Jumping back through to Unity so I can really familiarise myself with their neat particle system. Now this part of the process was very much largely just trial and error, seeing what works and what doesn't. There were a few important factors I needed to take into account though when creating these flow systems;
1: The data flow should be seen in all areas of the game (both light and dark).
2: The flow should lead the player towards the final portal.
With that in mind I began working on my trial and error process. Now, I began working primarily with Robin's placeholder particles which consisted of a sea of particles. We had an idea of introducing the player to the data flow with a small sea of particles, this allowed the player to see the data up close, watch the direction of the current as well as the potential to learn the valuable lesson that the data flow is not exactly friendly.
In order to make sure the data flow didn't overshoot and kill the player past this point I constructed a sort of barrier so enclose the particles.The problem with this is that it really wasn't that appealing visually.
Now this process took some time trying to get it to look "right" but ultimately it was scrapped. It portrayed the flow in a way that just didn't work out the way the team wanted it to so we went back to the drawing board.
Putting that area's data flow on hold for now I moved on to the next area. Here I tried creating a sort of reverse waterfall leading up towards the final level portal.
Once again though, I've found that this was still lacking in what I really wanted the data flow to really look like so I scrapped that idea and found myself back at, the ever so familiar, square one. I feel like at this point I really was focusing on the wrong thing as I had yet to decide what the particles would be made up from, how dense (on average at least) they were going to be, etc as all of this would affect the overall appearance. My solution to this was to take a much closer look at what I felt the particles should really be. A lot of the previously made concept art by Mus and Robin illustrated the data flow as being made up of different shapes and sizes rather the the plain square planes I've been using.
After plenty more tweaking of shapes and sizes I did eventually come up with something that we liked, but something was still missing, it was still lacking something.
After some deliberation about the visual effects of the data flow we settled on adding a haze. This would also help it stand out from the sky, though this created a new problem; what colour is the haze going to be?
After creating over 30 haze gradients of varying hues of blue and purple we finally settled on a very pale blue. Although this didn't address the problem of standing out against the very pale blue sky of the later levels. To get around this I added a light which gave the haze an added brightness to help it stand out.
You can see here how different the colour of the sky makes the appearance of the particles. Especially without the help of the other geometry to help break it up.