This week was all about learning how I would incorporate Visual Effects (vfx) into my game. Going into this project I knew I wanted to incorporate a variety of vfx (smoke, explosions, starbursts, etc.) to make the potion crafting feel visually rewarding. As the player created increasingly difficult potions the vfx would increase in scale to reflect their difficulty.
I found several forum posts from people working in the industry and a GDC conference about their approach/the unique development of stylized vfx. Since my project has a more cartoonish aesthetic I want the vfx to reflect this.
This Game Developer’s Conference on the creation of vfx for the game Gigantic was very insightful, but unfortunately the gifs in the slides don’t play so I can’t visualize the step by step of how they created some of their vfx.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024715/Art-Directing-VFX-for-Stylized
One of the developers of Rime held a conference on his experiences creating vfx in Unity for the game, specifically the waterfall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwKQyDZ4ark
An associate of his then took this conference’s material and created guide on how to recreate this same waterfall effect.
Finally, a game developer named Etienne POV created a blog post detailing how they created their stylized vfx. The vfx they break down was one that they entered into a competition Riot Games and won. This was an incredibly helpful resource because this is almost the exact style I’m looking to recreate within my own project.
https://80.lv/articles/creating-stylized-vfx-in-unity/
Her ArtStation has also given me a lot of inspiration and ideas for what I can do myself.