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WU 2020-11D - VFX!

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago874 words

I've mostly focused on visual effects this week!

I thought I'd have a demo by now, but I've been stuck at what I thought would take about a week for what feels like more than a month now. I did take a week off recently, so that comes into it, but still.

I'm trying to get to the point where I can run around a little dungeon and have battles, and everything works and looks as it should. I've already had the basic foundation of that for a while, but I suppose what I'm doing now is the equivalent of adding detail to a blocked-out sketch.

Here's a random video (not by me!) of a digital portrait timelapse, as I feel the processes are abstractly similar:



The big picture's roughly there in the first minute of that video, and the rest of the time is devoted to making slow, detailed additions such that it looks like there's little to no real progress if you just sit there and watch it (I couldn't be bothered to stick with that video myself, but it's interesting to just skip ahead a few times). At the end you can look back and see all the work that was done, but those small, incremental changes do take a lot of time and might not be individually very interesting to be there for if you're not the one making them.

So chances are it'll look like I'm stuck at the same place for a while, as I fill in these necessary details bit-by-bit. I just have to stick with it! Thanks to those of you who are checking in through this slog stage, though!



Here's an enormous (~70MB) gif which includes much of what I've made this week:



Before I comment on anything else: those silly dances they're doing while 'cheering' make me laugh, but I'll change them to less stupid animations eventually! (Probably just waving their weapon in the air or something.)

The spell/hit particle effects are the most obvious thing here, I'd say. I watched a few tutorials to familiarise myself with Unity's particle system before starting, but actually creating the effects using the tool was very similar to what I did with my old games like MARDEK. Now that I know what to do and have made a few, adding more should be fairly easy. They don't take long, either; I added the eight currently in the game in a day, while still figuring things out. The Stonesplosion one (a spell lifted from MARDEK) is probably the most impressive of these!

When casting a spell, an elemental glyph appears on the floor like in MARDEK, as a reference to that.

Sword attacks have a slash trail effect, which lasts for a split second and took several hours to add. Time well-spent, right?? It's something I've been wanting to add for a while, and figuring out how to add such a thing was an interesting technical challenge (I settled on writing code to procedurally generate a mesh based on the weapon's position during a specified window).

I talked about Deugan's greatshield last time, and there were comments about how it'd be used. The animation here lacks sharpness; I intend to improve it. Someone last time mentioned how maybe he should slash horizontally; I've done it this way because I was essentially recreating MARDEK's animations, but maybe both characters should use horizontal slashes now that I don't have the restrictions of 2D. The edge of Deugan's greatshield was always intended to be bladed, but it wasn't clear before. I've added some details here that maybe make it clearer? Though I'd also like to make it somewhat metallic, but that's non-trivial with the flat shaders I'm using here.

Speaking of shaders, I did a lot of work on those these week. If you don't already know, a shader is essentially a thing - kind of a mini program, I suppose, or a script? - written in a particular shader programming language which determines how the object is rendered: the colour, lighting, transparency (if any), layering, etc. I've been editing them for a while now, though I'm still very much an amateur. I've coded a general character shader which supports outlines, transparency, glow, and the dissolve effect on death, many of which were either in separate shaders or didn't even work before. Boring behind-the-scenes technical stuff! Compare the old Neuronaut (uisng some standard Unity shaders, I think?) with the one using this new shader:





Characters hop forward when its their turn; they didn't before.

I've changed the Creation glyph to a spiral proportioned after the Golden Ratio. Seemed fitting!

I've added icons for moods, though they're not fully implemented yet, so these all just show neutral moods.

I talked about 'concords' in the previous post, and I've implemented most of their effects now. You can see the Cheer and Avenge effects here. The damage on Avenge is currently really poor though; I'll edit that. The Mind gain from Cheer might be too large, though. Balancing is a long process!



That's it for this week, so this is a shorter post than usual!