5 Hours of Particle Effects

I’ve been working on The Cube (remember him? He’d clump about the arena not really doing much but being kinda cool).

Well The Cube has gotten a little smaller and had a facelift. He’s also learnt a new trick - Stay still too long and he might just charge straight at you. All that tumbling around? That’s just so he can line you up for a smashing.

Anyway 5 hours ago that attack looked like this:

I promise you he’s moving at a fair lick in that screenshot.

Read on to find out how it went on for 5 hours.

First we have to figure out what this might look like. I decide to use the fireballs from Streetfighter as inspiration.

So we crack open UnrealEd and get fiddling in Cascade and we end up with this.

Close but it needs a lot more noise adding to it and while we’re at it lets put in some particles that will drop to the ground and bounce around. Those are always cool.

90 minutes later:

Better but still needs work. The trail especially is bugging me as it has much too harsh an edge. We need a better texture and some shader work. Also I think I need to crack open the soft-light blend mode for this.

2 hours pass and much fiddling later we have something that’s pretty much finished. We’ve also added sound effects and a particle effect to show that it’s charging up it’s attack and gotten it into the Extension game mode.

Now after all that work it’d better damn well turn out to be the best thing in the game…