Portal Effects

After I had worked on the start effects for the game, I went onto making the portal effects. Before we had decided to take the base away, I had already done a few tests with it to see how it would look. I first started with a bubble effect where it would rise off the platform, however this didn’t match the style of the game, and didn’t look good with the model. I then went on to match the circular style I was going for in the first place to match it with the portal base. For the middle design I had the idea that the portal effect would go up, and acting as if it was scanning the player, and then when it goes back down it slowly teleports them away. I went with a green-yellow-purple colour change as I thought they all worked really well together, and it would stand out from the model we have been making. With the third design I wanted to take that scanning idea but keep it more static. So rather than the effect goes up and then down, it would stay where it is. This one I feel working quite well as it the spacing of the effect makes it seems like small lights spinning around.

The first test I did with these three designs looked fine in the editor mode, but when I went to record it in the play mode, they all went a bit distorted and wrong. At first, I didn’t know what was going on, I just thought it was the recording, but it kept doing the same thing in the game view. After playing around with the settings I found that it was my simulation speed setting that was affecting the results. So, once I changed that from local to world, it fixed it.

After I had fixed the main portals, I took them and had created a few different variations of each. I changed the colours for most and then added some extra effects to others just to see what people liked. Through my whole process I was sending them to my team and seeing which one they preferred. Some of the colours were random choice to see what worked, and some were chose from the colours we have been using a lot; the blue and yellow one at the back. The first row was a bit plain and boring, the next row looked quite good, especially the last one, and the last row had a really nice patter to the effects.

A little while after I had completed these portal effects and sent them off, was when we decided to get rid of the base model. So instead I was asked to create a floor portal effect so the player could go to that instead. The chose effect was the middle one, so what I decided to do was make something similar to that, that circles on the floor. I started with one that would match the patter of the top effect, but this one felt a little empty when it was starting and finishing as there were two big gaps. The next I decided to offset it a little which worked quite well. I was trying to match the bottom one spin in the opposite directing but for some reason it didn’t like that. The third one I was going for the idea of having the central light of the tele-pad but as an effect, so I copied the outside effect and shrunk it, so it fit in the middle. And then the final one I just wanted to have a shimmer on the floor with the effect going over the top. The one that was used was the design with two floor effects. One thing I would like to try is combine this top effect, with the ring from the previous effect.