Typically, RPG spells create flashy particle effects when used, and I've been putting off adding proper ones to the skills in Atonal Dreams. So I finally got around to that this week!
I actually spent the first three days of the week continuing last week's script tweaking. The scenes still aren't perfect, and I'd like to fiddle around with a handful of them a bit more, but I thought it best to at least do something else for a while so then I can get back to them with fresh eyes.
Usually when I see indie devs promoting their games, their videos and gifs are full of flashy, visually appealing effects like excessive glowy sword swooshes with glitter everywhere, brief slowdown or pauses and screen or character jittering to add weight and power to the various attacks you'd be inflicting... Maybe you know what I mean?
It always gives me the impression that most people who get into games just want to replicate and enjoy that visceral thrill, and some comments from testers gave me the impression that this kind of thing - making every little button press a dramatic lightshow to generate what I've seen some people refer to as 'the serotonins' and others as dopamine (and as someone who studied neuroscience at uni I should really have an idea of which one is more accurate, but eh) - is extremely important in modern games in general.
And I can understand and appreciate that, but it's never really been all that important of a thing for me. It could be because I'm older, and the games I grew up with definitely had fancy visual effects, but they were limited by the hardware so they weren't as impressive as what's possible or common these days. Or maybe it's because my personal interest in games is more slow paced and cerebral, while that sort of stuff appeals more to players who like twitchy action? Or something?
Whatever! I overthink everything. Here are some particle effects:
I spent a while trying to convert this to a video or gif with as small a filesize as possible without losing too much quality. Hopefully this 7MB result I'm hosting from my own site will load without issues! Also, the names at the bottom are the effects' code names, or whatever the correct term is, rather than their display names, obviously!
Once I got started, I really got into it and made more of them than I expected to in the time that I spent. They still take perhaps longer than you'd expect, though, at least for me with my limited experience in this area and the constant tweaking that I did.
I liked making heavy use of the eye shape as if it's a recurring motif (leaves, claws, and harmony skill hits all use the same particle image).
'Proper' games have teams of people devoted to just the visual effects, and I'm just one guy who did these in a couple of days, so obviously they're not going to win awards or anything. But I hope they're good enough! I like them, at least. They're similar to the ones in MARDEK, probably.
I also need to add sound effects to go with them, so I'll do that next week. In MARDEK, I used a library of sound effects I found somewhere online, and I think that's what a lot of indie games do? But this time I'm making my own sound effects by combining foley clips from free sound effect websites. So instead of just using 'magic spell effect 4' or whatever, I'd combine 'smoke puff' and 'stick whoosh' and 'glitter sound' or whatever to create a composite with its own sound. I think professionals do some sophisticated version of this, though, again, I'm just one guy, so I'll hope that whatever I end up with is good enough.
While I tweak things like the dialogue endlessly because 'good enough is not good enough', areas like these are things where I'm fine with 'good enough'! Not a bad thing if it decreases the time until the frustratingly distant finish line!!
I've said - and genuinely thought! - for a couple of weeks now that I'll have got to a point where I can upload a new version for more testing 'next week'... but I'm still not there yet! I want to add and tweak some more stuff. But there's not much left to do before that point. Let's see how it goes!
Also, I had yet another dark hit to my poor mental health earlier in the week, which was resolved fairly quickly and led to a period of what I suspect - based on similar past experiences - may be hypomania; I spent over 9 hours yesterday intensely focused on some side project, and went to sleep feeling energetic, pleased, positive, and chatty (I talked a bit to someone in texts). So that's interesting! Good? Yes.
I'd love to post about that side project since it's another game, but it's probably best not to since I might just get bored of it and nothing will come of it. WE'LL SEE. Atonal Dreams remains my main focus, of course!
3 COMMENTS
Maniafig222~2Y
I think part of the reason why devs show off things like particles and animations is that it's the easiest and flashiest thing they can show off. This kind of stuff is usually called "game feel", I believe, and it is something that games are definitely using more and more of. Even something as limited as a visual novel uses a lot of effects during dialogues to add oomph where it needs to be. This even goes back to something as old as the sound of scoring a super effective hit in Pokémon vs a normally effective attack.
I actually had a complaint about this myself during testing, that it felt like some of the attack animations dragged out too long, which dampened the feel of performing an attack. These things such as visual flairs, sound effects and even the pacing of attacks are small things that can nonetheless really change how satisfying it feels to do things in video games.
I think almost everybody appreciates a game more when the actions they perform have the proper sense of weight that they should. MARDEK would be a lot less satisfying if every attack just used the same generic hit sound and SFX rather than a distinct sound effect and SFX depending on the skill.
I like the particle effects!!
I actually did play an indie RPG recently, and it used a lot of the same stock sounds as MARDEK! That was always amusing, since the game is very definitely in the 18+ for sexual content category, so hearing these sound effects I associate with MARDEK used in this game made for a funny sort of discord.
Hypomania!! That's almost close to Mania. You're becoming more like me every day, yes!!
2
astralwolf92~2Y
I like the heal herb effect.
Also the shield effect would be nicer if it was light blue imo instead of purple
1
Tobias 1115~2Y
It's purple because it's a Fear skill, and that element is purple.
3