This week has been very hectic, we worked hard to get a somewhat solid level for the alpha test for people to play.
I have been working primarily on the effects and particles this week for feedback purposes and readability.
I have never worked in depth with the Unity Particle Systems so i had to experiment allot and look what others had done to get the desired effects. I bought some particle effects i thought was cool and dissected them to see how they where made and used that knowledge to make my own.
These are effects i created this week.
Far left is the small boost that when picked up will give you a small amount of speed.
To the right of the small boost is the Checkpoint Boost, here you will get a significantly amount of speed, and you will also be able to spawn from this location at any point in the game.
To the right of the Checkpoint Boost is the Spark, there are still some work to be done on the spark. The Spark will be used to reward explorers with allot of score points.
The two circle effects are for the pumping. When you pump correctly and are gaining speed the blue circles will appear around the wheel of the avatar and when you pump incorrectly and lose speed the red one will appear.
The last one to the far right is for when you pick up a Small Boost. The particles will for a small amount of time stick to the avatar and then stick to the game world and fall off you.
I will go more in depth on how i created the small boost effect.
I started out with a standard Unity Sphere and applied the standard unity shader Particle/Additive(soft), as a diffuse i used blue color with about 50% blackness. The shader will then remove the black and keep the original color and make it transparent depending on the amount of blackness in the color. I can now put a particle system inside the sphere and they will still show through.
The Particle System is a bit more complex.
It is using the main particle emitter and two sub-emitters.
The first emitter creates the lightning bolts, the material for the bolts are the same as the sphere to give it a suddle transparancy to make it more smooth and not so harsh. The gradiant at the start of the lightning bolt is also to make it so it looks like it fades in then just pop in from the emitter. It also has a suddle glow that is barley visable.
There is too many different options to go through them all but the picture above shows what i used to create this Particle System.
The two sub-emitters on the other hand is pretty simple, the particles are created on the birth of the lightning bolts. The first is just a standard unity particle effect the it creates this ball in the center of the sphere that is the core of the boost, the other particle effect is a more hectic effect but barely visible to help convey the lightning.
Next week i will be working on some more effects and to make some new tileable ramp assets.
Mikael Karlsson Gamedesign 