Star Effects

One of first things people think of when talking about space is the billions and billions of stars. But not only are there these giant balls of gas, there are smaller balls of ice and rock called comets; or more commonly know as shooting stars. One of the things I had created for the game was a shooting star effect, and the plan was to have them trigger when the player taps somewhere around the screen. I had used the particle system before, but I watched a video online just to refresh on how to use it properly.

At first a tried to keeping the as closed to a shooting star with how it flies, but I was limited by what I could do with the Unity particle effects tool. So, I decided to make them a little stylised and stand out. We have a very bright neon game, so I wanted to try and match that. The first star is the big yellow one which was trying to emulate a true shooting start. It came out quite well and the trail looked really good. I wanted to get more of a thing trail, but I wasn’t sure how to do that, which I then figured out later on when doing my portal effects.

The next one I did was the blue / yellow one. I just want to start experimenting with colours to see what would work and it turned out quite nice. As the trail goes further on the effect changes colours from one to the other. This effect is little similar to the first, but the trial was a little thinner, and the end trail effect was a little more controlled, compared to the previous being a bit more exaggerated.

With the third trail I did manage to get it more streamlined instead of having the spreading effect. The colours don’t match that of a normal shooting star, but with I wanted to test something a look more vibrate, and have it stand out more. The colours of this one goes from a red to a pinkie colour, and then to white. Where I managed to get the trail, more streamlined I decided to make the end of it flicked a little more and have a random effect on the end.

I used a simple code that I got from online to be able to get the launch using space, and I angled it using an empty game object that was rotated.