Today's Behind the Scenes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt9mah5g-jo
Which brings us to our Tech Tuesday, brought to you by one of our fabulous members of the team:
Greetings Travellers!
My name is Giulia and I’m an intern at Bossa Studios. I’m working on integrating the special effects (VFX) created by my colleague, Jason, into Worlds Adrift.
In this regard, before continuing reading I strongly suggest you take a look at his blog post, to better understand the process behind visual effects: https://www.worldsadrift.com/blog/visual-effects-revisited/.
As you know VFX are an essential element of movies and video games, both mediums need to mimic reality and arouse emotions, be it of danger, suspense or wonder. It is especially true for the latter as we continue to add more VFX into Worlds Adrift. This is to help players to better empathize themself and give appropriate feedback to each interaction.
So, how do we add a VFX? The first thing to do when implementing any new artwork in the game is to exchange information, in order to better understand how the end results will look like and that it matches the VFX concept. Once I have a good Idea what the final look should be, I begin coding. These are the steps I follow to implement the effects:
- Identify all the effect prefabs (unity combined gameobject) that I need to use.
- Find an anchor called a VFXnode on the prefabs, or create one using a gameObject. This allows me to add an effect at the correct place on a object Find the scripts to modify or add lines of code to trigger the effect
- Test on the game, not only to see if it works but also to make changes
When adding something new to the game a few issues can occur. The main issue I encountered was the effect would continually trigger. This bug of occurring every time a container is opened would reduce its impact and its reward magic. So by adding a timer between each opening fixed a couple of issues:
- VFX fires only once on initial opening like the opening of a pressurized container. So if the player continues to repeatedly open, the energy is spent so no VFX.
- VFX can act like a way to inform a player that the chest has already been opened by another player, or it’s fresh and ready for looting.
Below the images show how the separate parts come together.
A still of the open effect.
Circled VFX node I attach the effect to.
The final combined effect and object.
...and my code tells the game when to fire the effect at the correct time during the animation!
I hoped you liked this brief insight to VFX coding. So until next time, Ciao, and…
See you in the skies!