Shotone VFX- Developing Volley! (Patreon)

Hello! Welcome to our first post about VFX in Shot One! I'm Ruben (Aka Rubfish)

Character’s VFX are always a nice challenge. Capturing a character's personality, readability and excitement via the VFX is what I strive for.

For this example, I am going to focus on her ultimate ability, Bunker Buster, as I consider it a perfect example of all the elements that make a VFX successful. Here's a breakdown of the elements I look at before I start work on any VFX.

1) Personality: How do we make VFX unique to a character?

 We have many characters that use fire as their main element (Such as Kiera). Even when “fire” is a shared concept, there are differences we can stablish for Volley.

Her main power comes from “explosions”, her cyborg arms and augments being a great source of power, overloading and burning everything when she decides to unleash them.

(3 expressive types of fire VFX)

2) Readability: How well do the VFX read in game and tie into the character?

Some of the effects in our game need to stay on the same values; they need to keep clean and readable even if it’s the first time you pick a character. Similar of what you could see on a fighting game, where most of the impacts are shared to easily understand the differences between a low, mid or high damage effect.

(Example of different VFX for each character's dash in our test bed)

3) Excitement: Readability is important, but it’s even more important to raise the level of hype we create with each ability. Ultimate abilities need to be an extreme moment, so executing these successfully in a match should be a great moment for a player and VFX are the key to raise that to the limit.

For this, we experimented with different elements. Like setting the environment on fire when the goal happens.

For the fire I created a special shader, that makes it super easy to animate and adapt it to the situation with some simple texture masks and mesh options. Creating a cool fire that retains a hand painted look while keeping the randomization and the quick iteration process is the goal here.

(Animatic concept for the Bunker Buster VFX)

Step 1: Using all the principles above when approaching this ability, I designed and iterated on the Bunker Buster. Starting off with a simple animatic, I layered on the VFX step by step.

(Charge up phase)

Step 2: The ability charges from the arm, so I focused on building up there and increase the amount of intensity on that spot, indicating the player (with a small explosion) that we’ve successfully charged the ability. Afterwards the energy is released, creating one of the highest moments of impact in our game, including negative frames and sparks that covers half of the screen just for a couple of frames (enough time to create that amazing moment, but not enough to cause gameplay problems or readability issues).

Step 3: The Bunker Buster fully unleashes, leaving a blazing inferno behind due to how fast it travels across the arena. With all the elements combined, we have a badass ability that is unique to Volley, reflects her explosive abilities and offers an exciting payoff for building up the charge to execute it.

This is hype. This is the approach I've been applying to each champion to make them all unique in their own way. Keeping some key principles in mind helps maintain a unified visual language across the board for players.

Thank you for checking out this ability breakdown and look forward to sharing more in the future! 

-Ruben (SrRafles)