Hey ho! Philippe here, VFX artist (among other roles in our small team) for Deck of Haunts.
For those of you not in the know, when I write VFX, I refer to Visual Effects. ✨
I've been pumping out explosions, sparks and magic for some years now, but never in this dark grungy and almost isometric style. (You can find more about the art style here)
Real time visual effects are not only the cherry on top of everything else, but are also used to better convey gameplay elements towards the player. By combining elements from texturing, modeling, tech-art and animation, you can conjure up all sorts of interesting illusions to breathe life into the game world.
The most important part doing VFX for Deck of Haunts, is that you have to put the emphasis on the player being the house. I had to keep this in mind with every particle effect I made, since it is really easy to fall into the trap of just making everything look "magical", rather than grounded in the house.
To give you an example, this is the effect we had at the very early stages of the project, for "Shifting Hallways" AKA teleporting a human to a random room:
As you can see it has more something of a wizards finger snap & teleport, than the actual house doing something to the human.
Here is a rework of the effect. Some planks coming out of the ground and pushing the human into another room:
Of course it all needs to go fast to not put a drag on gameplay.
In our recently released "Release Date Trailer" you can see some of the effects that I loved making, for instance the dissolving of a card when it gets banished or the lightning storm towards the end of the video:
Being a VFX artist, a lot of times that also means optimizing the game.
Here you can see the before and after of a specific ground material. The less red, the better the performance. Profit!
There are a ton more of effects I'd like to share with you, but... You'll have to play the game to find out what they all are, not spoiling any more ;).
If you've made it until here, well done!
Thank you for reading and I hope to see all your cool house builds on socials or on this hub, once the game is out 🖖
PS: Make sure to tell your friends to wishlist Deck of Haunts, it helps a ton! 🔔