We on the Visual Effects Team at GPG thought we'd take a moment to give everyone some insight into the creative processes behind making special effects for a game like Demigod. If you look off to your left, you'll see Aaron Lundquist; Effects Artist and Kung Fu fan. To your right you'll see Gordon Duclos; Effects Team Lead and professional Ninja. I'm Matt Vainio, your tour guide, and I help make video game magic COME ALIVE. We three amigos are the centralized VFX team for GPG and create effects for all of its titles.
Creating visual effects is one of the most varied and interconnected aspects of game creation. We work within all three pillars of game creation: Design, Art and Technology. All of these various areas have their own unique concerns that make effects creation both challenging and extremely rewarding. A change in one department affects our work and likewise our work affects all other departments. We on the Effects Team end up being a combination of Artist/Designer/Engineer/Magician in our daily work-flow.
Visual effects are a reflection of game design through their speed, timing, scale, impact and other factors to provide the player with an accurate visual picture of the design of an ability, weapon, environmental hazard - the list goes on. Effects can influence game design through the player's interpretation of what they see and are a tremendously powerful tool to adjust perception of game design. For example, creating an effect for an ability design brings with it questions such as: How large is the radius of affect? What is the relative damage to other abilities? Is the damage instant or over time? Is there an associated buff or debuff? What does the animation and all other timing look like? These are just a few of the many questions involved and are questions of context, which is a critical component of good VFX design. Until you understand the context of a design, you cannot develop a visual representation of it.
The artistic aspect of effects creation cannot be understated. The Lead Artist on a project sets a style for the overall game and we spend a significant amount of time ensuring that each visual effect fits within the visual language of the game world. One of the main ways we accomplish this is through our iterative system. When initially creating an effect, we are not concerned with any visual aspect other than scale, timing and general brightness/color. It's basically 'sketching' in VFX form. We spend as much time as is necessary at this stage and iterate using peer review. The three of us sit next to each other and talk to each other constantly to look at works in progress and give feedback. After an effect is roughed in, we begin the process of finalizing its visuals. By sketching what is in our head, looking at reference of real events when possible or movie special effects when appropriate, we come to a consensus what the final effect should look like.
From this point, we use various image editing tools to paint and photosource particle textures. Each individual texture works in unison in the final effect, blending together in different methods to achieve our desired result. In a game like Demigod one of the main artistic challenges is the variable player camera angle and zoom. Every visual effect needs to look good at all possible distances and we use a variety of tricks to achieve this. An example is adjusting the 'MIP Levels' of our particle textures. Depending on the in-world size of an effect particle (or any other texture in the game), a different scale of the same texture is used. This is called MIP Mapping. We adjust the different Mip Levels of a texture to increase the size of details at smaller MIPs so that at a distance the effect is still readable. Other artistic challenges include achieving the proper scale of detail for the size of the effect within the game world, having the effect look as similar as possible across a wide variety of playfields (which vary in color/value tremendously), avoiding any visual repetition of particle assets and being unique enough from other ability or environment effects to be readable. This is just a sampling of problems and techniques within the artistic spectrum of creating VFX.
On a technology and engineering level our job is to make sure that all effects perform within established guidelines and interact with scripts efficiently. We also make sure they are managed properly, which is to say that the effects appear and disappear at the right moments. Having Fire Nova effects stay around long after the damage has been done would be bad, real bad, but I've never done anything even remotely like that so don't worry. On a performance level, our goal is to create the best visuals with the least amount of particles and without taxing graphics power. On the other hand, we're out to push technology to its limits with those who have high end systems. To this end, we have tied effects to the visual fidelity low/medium/high settings within the video options of Demigod. We scale and adjust all effects to perform at each of these different settings so users can customize based on their own computers capability. On the high fidelity settings we use refraction (heat shimmer) shaders and procedural particle distortion. A good example of procedural particle distortion can be seen in the ambient cold wispy mist effects surrounding the TorchBearer.
This footage is completely in-game, nothing you see here is pre-rendered.
So there you have it, probably sounds more complicated than it actually is. Wait, it's actually way more complicated than I wrote about but completely more fun as well. Even though effects don't get much (if any) mention in reviews we feel it's a very important part of the overall design, art and engineering of a game. Just try playing a game with effects disabled. We dare ya.
