Elemental Particle Effects

My name is Greyson Perrin. I'm a programmer and VFX artist for Superklutz.

In this game, the player can use three abilities to interact with objects: fire, ice, and electricity. Superklutz uses these powers by shooting a ball of the selected element at the target. In this post, I will share some information on the particle effects used to create these three projectiles.

The simplest particle effect is the one for ice. The ice projectile is a glowing light blue sphere surrounded by white particles that slowly drift down, resembling an icy mist. The particles shrink towards the end of their lifetime, allowing them to disappear in a more natural way than if they simply popped out of existence.

In all of the effects, the particles have a short lifetime of less than a second, ensuring that they do not move very far from their spawn point. This is so the projectiles leave a trail behind them as they move, without there being so many particles that the player might be confused.

Here is what the ice projectile looks like in motion.

The effect for the fire projectile was a bit more involved. For this one, I opted not to use a sphere and instead to rely solely on the particles to make a fireball shape. To make the particles move upwards, I gave them a negative gravity value so they would fall away from the ground instead of towards it. Over time, the particles change from yellow to red and gradually shrink, in order to mimic the colors and shapes of real fire. I think the effect looks especially good when the projectile is moving.

The last element is electricity, which was the most complex effect. The projectile is composed of a glowing yellow sphere and two particle emitters. The first emitter replicates sparks of electricity by shooting out yellow particles that fall down due to gravity. The second emitter is the more interesting one: a series of ribbon trails. The way it works is when the emitter spawns a particle, a line stretches between the particle and a previously spawned particle, connecting them. This particular emitter has 5 ribbons all connecting between several particles at once, simulating the jagged lines of electricity. The actual particles spawned by this emitter cannot be seen as their visibility is set to 0, so only the trails are visible. This is the effect I enjoyed making the most.