Hey there !

I wanted to make a post about the colourful design of Rhythm Overdrive.

If you don't know about our game, it's a shootem'up with ennemies dancing on the BPM, with a lot of VFX & particles.

The VFX work was really funny and quite simple. We used Unity to make our game, so I did basically all with the Shuriken particle system, creating simples particle, then animating their color, fade, motion etc.. by tweaking curves and changing values like lifetime or gravity.

Particle effect when a power up is collected

I used the same methods for creating other effects like ennemies explosions, combo flames, or even red weapon.

Trails were a bit different. I used the trail renderer component with custom textures, to make ennemies projectiles, yellow weapon, & player reactors.

For those who are new with VFX, trails are basically some 2D ribbons who are following the path of a moving object.

Trail renderer component

Shader time ! I'm not a CG language / HLSL pro, so I used a node-based editor called Amplify to make our shaders. Because a large amount of our graphic assets are moving to the beat, I had to make easy properties & values that can be animated via a script, to follow the music's BPM.

For example, the texture of the walls have a panning UV value going from 0 to 1, and at every beat it resets.

Wall panner

The method to animate the hexagons was a bit different. To make them "bump", I had to use a texture with gradient all over the hexs, then create a sort of threshold layout in the shader, to use the min & the max values of the gradient as two textures channels. At least, I multiplied these values with a gradient mask & a color (which is animated with our master BPM script).

Example of texture threshold

Animated background hexagons

Same method is used for the bumping hexs of the playing area, and others details in the game.

I think that's it for a quick overview of our visual effects, don't hesitate to ask me anything about this, and if you haven't played our game yet, feel free to test it !

> Rhythm Overdrive page <

Thanks for reading, and sorry for those english mistakes~