You still have a chance to survive in The Riftbreaker when your HQ explodes, but you will have a lot of cleaning up to do.
Now that you know how we prepare particle effects in our games, let’s move on to some practical applications of those. Single explosions, bullets, blood splats or wood splinters flying around look fun, but our possibilities do not end there. We very often combine multiple effects into sequences. Thanks to this technique it is possible to achieve massive, spectacular cascades of fire, sparks, and debris that look as if they were taken from a Hollywood action film. It’s quite an interesting process, which requires some creativity and destructive imagination, so let’s take a look!
Multiple buildings changing their state at once is often a sight to behold.
Most objects that you see in EXOR Studios’ games can be either damaged or completely destroyed during regular gameplay. Some of those objects are small and relatively insignificant - a tree, for example. It can either stand perfectly healthy or be destroyed. Entities with the health point system are a little different. Apart from the “100% OK” state (max health) and the “dead” state (0 health) we also have a ‘damaged” state - anywhere between 1% and 99% health (approximately, of course ;)). The bigger an entity is, the more HP it is likely to have - and if it has a lot of HP, we might give it destruction levels.
Friendly fire is not a thing in The Riftbreaker, but we used it to show you different destruction levels for the Armory in a controlled environment.
Destruction levels are damage thresholds that we use to trigger certain effects. For example, the Headquarters in The Riftbreaker look different when they are at 100%, 75% or 10% health, with more smoke and fire breaking out as the building becomes damaged. This system is not exclusive to buildings and applies to creatures as well - they get wounded and bloody as the damage increases. The purpose of the destruction level system is to give players feedback. We want you to know that your attacks are hurting the creature you’re hunting. We want you to know that the creatures hunting you can hurt you too.
The core blowing up in X-Morph: Defense is not a positive thing, but the visuals at least make up for the game loss.
There are usually several destruction levels for a destructible entity. When the health drops below a threshold specified by one of the destruction levels, a group of effects is triggered. Physical parts are spawned, each with individual properties, such as weight, dimensions, buoyancy, friction upon hitting the ground - you name it. The parts are given the texture of the object they were spawned from in order to maintain consistency. What is also important - the parts do not just appear out of nowhere - they are pushed out by a force at the center of the object that randomly changes the direction and power (maintaining a vector aiming away from the object). This way you can’t predict what the debris will do once it starts flying.
A particle effect can be attached to any of the yellow spheres.
When the destruction level is reached, the material on the object changes as well. Cracks, impact holes and other damage starts to show. To reach the level of visual polish we aim for it’s necessary to add particle effects. They are attached to specific points on the model and we try to set them up as realistically as possible. If there is a structural vulnerability, a pipe, or some exposed wires - we set it on fire. Each model requires manual setup when it comes to attaching effects.
We started playing around with explosion sequences in X-Morph: Defense.
An important aspect of this feature is that we can control when a particle effect starts its ‘playback’. This allows us to prepare sequences of explosions. For example, when the Headquarters in The Riftbreaker reaches 0 HP, a sequence of multiple explosions will start. They happen all over the place, varying in intensity, culminating in the complete destruction of the building in a big bang.
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