VFX for Video Games - Necromancer Monk

Github Repo

Playlist containing videos of progress over time.

Inspiration:

My effects were initially inspired by the GrishaVerse book series by Leigh Bardugo. In these books, the author uses vivid detail to present a morally grey and troubled character with abilities similar to a necromancer (e.g. raising the dead). The character uses her abilities to fight, but also to save those she loves.

"The net, she demanded. Now. The corpses moved in a blurry burst of speed, rushing forward, then suddenly halting, as if awaiting instruction. She gathered her concentration and willed them to obey, shoving all her strength  and life into their bodies. In seconds they had the net in their hands, and they were running, so fast Nina could not track them." 

- Nina uses the undead to catch someone with a net.

"Now that the fear of the ambush and Inej's fall were abating, she felt a kind of disgust. What had she just done? What had she tempered with?" 

- Good or evil? Not clear to the character.

Using these books as inspiration, I began looking at games for a better reference. Fade was one of the best references, as her colour pallet is dark and evil using smoke.

Colour Pallet:

I then looked at colour pallets, fades was too evil, I wanted a level of balance. I initially tried using black and white, with purple decals to ensure the colour value fit with all environments. I found this impossible, as when using life steal abilities, the idea could only be conveyed with red.

In the end, I settled on using these four simple colours: Black, White, Green, Red. Black and White demonstrate the clear dichotomy between chaos and order as well as evil and good. Red and Green worked to demonstrate the gameplay factors, Red is bad, Green is good.

Substance Designer:

In this project, I also used Substance Designer. Here is an example of how I demonstrated this dichotomy I described earlier. I used religious symbols, clear and obvious to most players, to represent good and evil. The cross used is blurred a little, so the hard edges don't look too threatening, the pentagram on the other hand is sharp, it also has no circle surrounding it, it only has hard edges. In engine, I then go further, showing the pentagram to be black and dark, while the cross sigil is green and glowing.

My Character:

My character has a life pool, storing the health of those she has stolen from with the Life Steal Tornado. She can then summon a Life Grenade to heal, or, store up the stolen health and summon a storm (using the sigils mentioned earlier), transforming that storm into health for everyone in range.

Blueprints:

On top of VFXs, we were also graded for how optimal are Blueprints were. My project has a pooling system for the effects, this is good, because when there will only be one at a time, it is more efficient than spawning and destroying constantly.

The effects are stored in a map, which can easily be used to get them via an enum ID.