Final day for this first prototyping session of Particular Reality!
As it always happens, things took more time than expected.
Still, thanks to how organized my schedule, I won't come out empty handed.
Let's do a short checklist of what to do:
tuning of enemy VFX
VFX for mana/health pickups
VFX to spawn in front of the portal, to make it obvious that you are facing a portal
VFX for fireball
VFX for hands (optional, might be hard)
switch (independent from debug view) between testing visuals we had until a couple days ago and VFX-powered visuals (also optional)
Making nice VFX and making it so they interact and blend nicely between each other would probably take another week, that I don't have, but patience.
It's a prototype after all, and I haven't decided yet if showing it to the public or not.
I might show it as it is and who cares.
It might stay "internal" and I might show a future iteration.
I might show to a few trusted friends privately.
I might show it to nobody (who am I kidding? That would be unbearable!).
We'll see.
To keep things simple and quick, I'm going to have a single behaviour able to manage all the VFX I do, using the same simple set of parameters that I already have used in my procedural animations with box and spheres.
Scale, color and spawn rate should be the barely minimum needed.
The same behaviour will also take care of disabling a MeshRenderer
unless we're in debug mode
All this wrapped in a nice #ifdef
so that it only applies to the URP version of the project, while in the BIRP version the behaviour methods are just empty stubs.
I tried this refactoring with the enemy VFX I did yesterday and worked just as I expected.
Now, I'm going to adjust the other elements logic using some stub VFX, and then I will try to make them actually look nice enough.
I changed a bit the enemies, then did mana/health pickups and fireball.
What's missing, then?
portal
hands and mana/health indicators (which might be on the hands themselves in some way)
Time for a break and we'll see where do I get to in the evening
The portal effect took some time because I needed something quite different from what I had already done for enemies, pickups and fireball.
I partially followed another tutorial but definitely couldn't do it blindly, as I had to properly position and rotate the particles in front of the portals.
It's tempting to try and do something about the hands and mana/health indicators, the last missing pieces of the puzzle. But it's too late and I'm quite tired.
So, hands and indicators will have to wait until the next iteration. Not too bad.
Here's a video with the new VFX in action:
How to end this prototyping devlog journey?
I couldn't resist and (after finding a suitable royalty free track on pixabay), I put together the first draft of a potential "prototype reveal" trailer. I'm aware that the title banner is awful, thanks.
That wraps it up. The first step in the development of Particular Reality has been done!
Note: with this entry, the first batch of “daily” posts, written during prototyping, is complete.
From now on, I’ll publish new content with variable frequency (hopefully, once a week).