Game Effects/VFX and shaders

Hello everyone, Caolan here. Today I will be quickly talking about our design process for adding in visual effects as well as a few shaders to our game. This will be split into 2 parts as there is a lot of effects we want to show to you

The first thing to mention is why we chose to add the effects we did to our game.  Due to our game having different car types ranging from your average racecar and coupe, to sci-fi designs like hover cars and APCs. to our more joke cars like a wooden toy and the mighty Roomba. For these car types, we wanted to make effects that would fit the type of car the player was in.

For this, we set up some of our effects in the game with some alternate versions that could be used for our more cartoony cars. For our more realistic cars, we used unity's built in particle system to make fire and smoke effects that could be used to help visually show the damage the players car has taken in a round. for our more cartoony cars, we made stylised smoke and fire effects using the Unity addon package VFX Graph. These effects can be edited to change their colours, direction and lifetime, and in the case of the stylised smoke, we can even change its 3d mesh to allow us to make the stylised smoke any shape we wanted as long as we had the mesh to do so.

 When the players health has hit zero, an explosion effect was made using the particle system with a mix of 2d sprites and 3d meshes, This explosion has 2 versions: the first will leave a small mark on the ground after the explosion and is used when the players dies. The second version lacks the ground mark and is used for our exploding bullets powerup. these explosion effects also use a little bit of post processing to give them a nice glow to make the explosion stand out more. 

To help show to the players where they all are and what's going on in the game, we have made a basic outline effect that will highlight the player with their colour so they are easily visible. This extends to the bullets the player fires with a nice stylised trail that follows the players bullets and uses the same colours as the 4 players, so now you know whos bullets are about to hit you. For the players abilities, we also made some effects to tell the player your boost or shield is ready to be used again.

Finally, for the player who has the most wins in a game, we made a winner effect that places a gold glow with a animated ring around the current player with the most round wins, this effect also uses the same vfx graph addon like the smoke and fire and this lets us change the colour and texture of the effect. with this effect all players will now be able to tell whos in the lead and who they should shoot at more to win.

This is the end of the 1st part of this Devblog. be sure to check out the second parts when its up because we have more interesting effects and shaders we cant