Imogen Davies
real-time vFX artist
Varial
combo Power Up
Combo Power Up
With the combo meter being an important mechanic in the player's experience and success, it needed an appealing and engaging visual achieved through materials and particle effects.
Varial can get up to 5 levels of combo. The power up needed to be balanced enough so it wouldn't overwhelm the character or visuals already on screen, but still look distinct between each combo level. To do this, we used 4 elements that could evolve after the rank they appear: music notes from his headphones, trails from his headphones, a fresnel glow over the material, and trails that orbit the character. All of these follow Varial's distinct blue and purple color scheme.
Combo 1
- music notes
Combo 2
- music notes
- headphone trails
Combo 3
- music notes
- headphone trails
-fresnel material
Combo 4
- music notes
- headphone trails
-fresnel material
-orbit trails (2 small)
Combo 5
- music notes
- headphone trails
-fresnel material
-orbit trails (1 big)
The actual material change is achieved through the manipulation of a fresnel mask and a panning gradient of blue and purple, all controlled by 3 parameters: coverage, brightness, and panning speed. This element took the most iterations so it would be noticeable and incremented without taking over the material.
Like most effects in Varial, the materials of particles are kept fairly simple while the emitters do most of the work. Both the orbit trails and the headphone trails share a texture that is used in Varial's skateboard trail as well. The movement of the orbits is driven by another invisible particle that sends its location for the trail to follow.
The headphones are a key component to the power up. Rather than just being another cool part of his character design, we wanted to utilize it as a source of his abilities; The music notes and headphone trails make up half of the effects.
The notes and trails both use custom sockets to spawn. In order to have consistent positioning when idle, the trails use a vector pointing from one socket to another to drive velocity. While in motion, it is the player's speed that drives the movement.
