ELEVATION & IMMERSION – THE MAGIC OF VFX
One of the things we find most intriguing about game design is how many pieces and people it takes to make a game whole. In the past few months, our team has grown considerably and with it, so have the changes to NO LOVE LOST!
One of said changes we’re most excited about are all the magical touches, Jordan, our VFX artist, has been peppering throughout the world of Drosera! In this month’s post, we will be discussing some of the most significant VFX additions to date and how we went about implementing them! Let’s get started!
CONJURING MAGIC
The very first step before even figuring out what we needed was deciding on the style and what would be appropriate for NO LOVE LOST.
We spent the first few weeks exploring different stylistic possibilities. Within the bounds of stylized VFX, there is a lot of range of what could fit in the game based on what we wanted to emphasize. With stylization, you’re constantly being pulled between grounded and “out-there”.
Afterwards, we went through all of the placeholders already in game, in order to get our VFX assets up to a certain standard, even if they weren’t final. Effects that were seen the most and had the most relevance to gameplay had priority.
For example, let’s look at the revive effect. It’s a pretty heavy commitment gameplay wise with a large payoff at the end, something that should have an appropriate effect. Once we set out to complete this task, a general outline of what happened was something like:
Think about how we wanted the effect to look.
Investigate how data was being transferred between objects in the game and where/how best to structure and trigger the effects systems.
Gather references from similar stylized games.
Start constructing textures, shaders and emitters piece by piece until the result is looking good.
Test and optimize to make sure the systems don’t bog down or crash the game!
Iterate, iterate and iterate again!
CASTING SPELLS
Now let’s try to boil down and analyze our effects. We’re quite happy and colourful but not totally cartoony, our effects have noise and detail to them without being overly complicated…our aesthetic is hard to pinpoint from a VFX perspective, depending on how grounded or “out there” you want things to be. We took a decent amount of time figuring out a baseline and still yet we go mostly by “feel” when we see a VFX, before pushing it towards where it needs to be to fit in with the rest of the game in order to sell high impact fun.
Looking back at the revive effect, here are some of the design decisions that went into getting it where it currently is aesthetically:
There’s a lot of noise and shape variation, but it remains “clean” with not much variances in opacity or an overload of detail.
For the explosion, it’s punchy and quick, again not cluttering the screen with noisy sprites.
The overall opacity level remains pretty high, transparency usually grounds things in an environment and making it more “real”.
The little health “pluses” that burst off at the end were our concession to fun gameyness at the expense of groundedness – these are the real pushes and pulls that define the main VFX concern from a stylization perspective.
TRANSFORMING THE BATTLEFIELD
Unlike 3D artists who have a more streamlined pipeline, the process for VFX artists often changes depending on what they’re creating. Here are some other ways Jordan has used VFX to enhance the gameplay experience.
The melee weapon attacks had to both be coordinated with programmers to make sure data was reaching the effects systems properly, as well as create a very stylized way to accentuate the combat that emphasized the movements of the animations.
The Hoverboard materializing and dematerializing was an important element to get right as it not only happens so often in the game, but our hoverboards/bikes are so prominent. In the end I managed to create a system that looks good for all permutations of the bikes in a completely systemic way.